Within By the Mango Belt and Tamarind Road, sourdough architecture unfolds as a relational technology – a pluriversal compass oriented not by fixed coordinates but by smell, humidity, touch, and time. It drifts with currents rather than stabilising them, using fermentation as a way of sensing and synchronising with time/space.

Within atelier 1 at silent green, the sourdough starter operates as a starter-timer: a living clock that structures the installation’s daily rhythm and organisational logic. Each day the space opens and closes with a public act of care: feeding the starter, marking the beginning of a cyclical, performative score. This feeding protocol is infrastructural, attuning the living culture to the room’s shifting microclimates and to the energies of those who pass through it.

At the center sits a modular bread-making counter, constructed from locally sourced Berlin materials, functioning as a pop-up sourdough caring center and temporary laboratory. Here, dough rests alongside residues drawn from the atelier’s circulating systems and invited practices: breadfruit, chips, pad thai, tilapia, materials left behind by workshops, conversations, and gestures throughout the day. The starter becomes a metabolic ledger, absorbing particles, atmospheres, and interactions, calibrating itself to the space’s drifting rhythms.

Each morning begins with approximately one hour of active work: setting up the counter, feeding the starter, and baking bread made from the previous day’s fermented dough, a moment of intensity and gathering. This is followed by a slower four-hour period of dough-making, intermittent folding, and waiting, during which the space remains open and porous to other workshops, uses, and transformation. By late afternoon, the dough is left to ferment overnight, marking the close of the day’s active labor while quietly carrying its accumulated traces forward.

Surrounding the counter, a series of webs: gentle holding structures for waiting, resting, and informal exchange, lower the horizon of the space. Soft and woven surfaces invite lingering and observation, allowing visitors to witness slow transformations of matter, relation, and ritual. As different workshops move through the studio, their residues: spatial logics, gestures, liquids, fibers, heat, are not erased but metabolised. For instance, spiced water from a workshop becomes part of the next day’s dough, folding collective presence into the bread itself.

Each evening concludes with a collective feeding, gathering the day’s atmospheres back into the living culture and asking what must be carried forward. The counter also houses a growing archive of sourdough starters collected through previous iterations of sourdough architecture: notes, starters from different geographies, climates, and research contexts, allowing each new collaboration to spatially and materially reconfigure the installation.

Through wild-yeast fermentation, sourdough architecture becomes a protocol for compassing and metaphoring: a response·able practice of care that holds multiple cosmologies at once.