THE GÂTEAU VIVANT 2024

Year
2024

Authors
Laura Beloff & Katri Naukkarinen

Image credits: Katri Naukkarinen, Laura Beloff

Gâteau Vivant (Beloff & Naukkarinen, 2024) is an artwork in the shape of small cakes that shimmer with iridescent colour. But beneath their delightful surface lies a provocative twist. These are no ordinary cakes—they are grown from living colonies of Flavobacterium IR1 strain, exposing the uneasy beauty of non-human life manipulated for aesthetic and economic purposes.

The Flavobacterium IR1 bacteria originate from sediment and the brown algae Fucus vesiculosus, collected from brackish waters near Rotterdam Harbour, The Netherlands. The authors acquired the bacteria through a biotechnology company with a commercial interest in the organism, while the artists were drawn to its aesthetic qualities and potential within an artistic context.

Both the company and the artists face a similar question: how can scientific or creative ambitions be balanced with ecological responsibility?

The work explores structural colour—colour produced not by pigments but by microscopic cellular structures interacting with light. What first appears beautiful gradually becomes uncanny: shimmering cakes that rot, grow and transform become symbols of control, exploitation and the fragility of interspecies relations.

By presenting bacterial life simultaneously as artistic medium and collaborator, the work questions assumptions about reciprocity, commodification of living organisms, scientific ways of seeing, and our relationships with more-than-human species.

Gâteau Vivant functions as a representation of a network involving bacteria, artists, scientists, viewers, the biotechnology industry, the exhibition context and even the cultural idea of the cake itself. Together these actors shape both the artwork and its meaning.