Life in the Kitchen Pot: Mold in Nikita Teryoshin and Max Slobodda’s Project

One day we decided to cook a pretty tasty potato soup. We searched for a pot and found it on the balcony and there was something inside of it. It was blue, yellow and sweating. We were fascinated of its visual appearance, before throwing the moldy spaghetti away, we took some pictures of them as a joke. After seeing the results, we decided to continue our documentation of things that once used to disgust us.

All products in the project are vegan. A lot of food photography, especially abstract or ‘weird’ food or even fashion photo projects, are using rotten meat, blood or corps of dead animals. These artists just want to use dead life to shock their audience of their ‘art’. That’s not the way how we look at life and how we look at art in general.

The most obvious side of mold is that it’s disgusting, unhealthy and ugly. But we saw the geometry, strange colors and forms and certain aesthetics. A picture of mold can appeal to many senses simultaneously. We like also to observe people at shows, looking at our work for the first time. They often cannot decide if they like it or just find it disgusting. You can see it clearly in their faces. Anyway, our motto is: give mold a chance!

The photographs in this project are about sex and decay, also about something concealed and unconscious. Or maybe we just sniffed too many mold spores already.

Due to a misunderstanding between the photo and the online editor of Vice Germany, the online editor called our article, which should have been about how to turn the mold in your kitchen into art, “Is that the dirtiest shared flat in Germany?“. You can for sure imagine the controversy that broke out. “Even pigs live cleaner as you!”, wrote one of the users, another one said they could have received herpes just from looking at our pictures. Now we are thinking of putting the best quotes on our website.