- ambassador of vitality.swiss
- board member Food Culture Days
- co-president of SGMK
„Cooking thus transforms us“, is a framework Maya Minder weaves like a strings through her work. Cooking serves her to reveal the metaphor of the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture and she combines it to the evolutionary ideas of a symbiotic co-existence between plants, animals and humans. She creates entanglements between human commodities and animism of nature. A table of diversity, not yet digested. Following the Biohacker, Maker and Thirdspace movement she uses grassroots ideas, safe zones and citizen science into her field to enable collective story telling through food and cooking.
*1983 lives and works in Zurich. Founder of the Open Science Lab at Zentralwaescherei Zurich. Exhibitions and grants: Palm Magazine, Jeu de Paume, Bioclub, Tokio, Ars Electronica AEGardens Piksle, Pro Helvetia, Werkbeitrag 2018 + 2020, KADIST AWARD 2017 (nomination), Part of the Klöntal Triennale 2017, Kunsthalle Zurich. Several grants and support from Migros Kulturprozent, Pro Helvetia, Gubler Hablützel Stiftung and Gerbert Rüf Stiftung. Workshops and persentation at ZHAW, ZHdK Department of Design and Fine Arts, Collegium Helveticum, Nachhaltigkeitswoche ETH Zürich, ABZ Schule Zurich. She is also a curator and organizer of projects and festivals independent and in co-production with the International Hackteria Society. She studied Art history at the University of Zurich and MA Fine Arts at Zurich University of Arts.
Maya Minder‘s Gasthaus lays in these current practices, an example of relational aesthetics in the age of the postdigital. Through the setting of a functional kitchen provided with all the necessary tools, it offers a local gathering point for people to cook and eat together while sharing ideas. What is more, it invites groups of artists and militants active in the field of nutrition and ecology - in particular those who built their praxis by developing new approaches to biotechnologies and DIY/DIWO methodologies - to discuss their visions and endeavors, using as a starting point and a mutual concept the process of fermentation. Similar to the concept of culture, which has its roots in an agricultural context and now encompasses concepts related to knowledge, values and civilization, the concept of fermentation, describing metabolic processes such as the chemical transformation of sugar into acids, refers as well to social phenomenon of agitation and uprising. Fermentation is an ancient cooking practice allowing the autonomous production of enriched nutriments. In Maya Minder‘s work, fermentation is a suitable and metaphorically charged activity to invite the guests not only to share their receipts and their alternative solutions to nutrition but also to debate on subjects such as home-made agriculture, food circulation, ecological issues, collectivism and gender roles.