This is the start of a series of workshops on tempeh fermentation that we’re running on Sunday mornings in our shared space, Akasha Hub Barcelona.

The participants are invited to join and to observe, understand, enjoy and take part in this fermentation process that unites the world of fungi and plants in a convivial setting, including tasting!

In the end of the workshop, participants have the choice of taking their tempeh home with them or leaving it to incubate in our fermenters on site and coming to collect it from the following Wednesday.

What can technology teach us? What is the scope of objects connected to the Internet? How can they be introduced to the new generations? What are the advantages and disadvantages of such objects?

These are the kinds of questions that the European project Internet of Tricks has asked us to consider. We are developing educational kits through which we will run workshops about the place of technology and connected objects in our society.

The first educational object we are designing is a connected tool that invites participants to close their eyes and meditate. This object, equipped with a camera, analyses the participants to detect their level of meditation and communicates from one object to another, inviting others to join a collective meditation. The object is open-source and designed to be built and deconstructed, learned and re-appropriated.

The second prototype we are working on is a connected plant care station. This device measures the environmental data of a plant, waters it according to its needs and displays the collected data on an online dashboard. The project is free and open-source and is intended to be comprehensive and understandable in order to teach the possibilities of prototyping, electronics and IOT.

We are happy to be able to work on this project which links our different interests: nature, technology and education.

Find the documentation on github : iot meditation link ; iot gardening station

Few months ago we met Amita in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He taught us everything he knew about tempeh and its fermentation. With him, we re-learned how to make tempeh, starting from the very basics and we made the biggest tempeh we had ever seen. We visited several tempeh workshops, from a family business to a women’s collective to a single man, in order to open our eyes to the practice, to observe how each one finds its way in this magnificent process that is the fermentation of tempeh. Thank you Amita for these discoveries and for your teaching.

Today we feel we know a thousand times more than before our journey. And every day we put this knowledge into practice in order to transfer it from the head to the hands.

With the will to make this 2023 a year open to the public, we moved our studio (and the club!) to a new space in Barcelona. We are very enthusiastic to join Akasha Hub Barcelona, a community space full of ideas and beautiful projects, with a large space and kitchen for events, a workshop for prototyping and a garden for growing food. We left our beloved Sudio with our two trolleys full of prototypes, experiments and good memories. Happy new year, come and visit us!

Hey tempeh fermentation lovers! Welcome to the club! We have created a group on Telegram to share tempeh practice, ideas and events, as well as to help each other with tempeh fermentation, give tips and tricks and enjoy this wonderful process together. Join us!

We have been invited last week by Pop-Machina to moderate and to give a guest talk for their distributed hybrid event. This event celebrated the completion of the Circular Maker Accelerator program, promoting circular entrepreneurship through makerspaces, with success stories and lessons learned for scaling up.

Pop-Machina is a Horizon 2020 project that seeks to highlight and reinforce the links between the maker movement and circular economy in order to promote environmental sustainability and generate socio-economic benefits in European cities.

It was fun and engaging for us to facilitate this event with all these new connected initiatives going together in the same direction, sharing their values and resources to implement a new economic model. We felt satisfied and optimistic about the next stories to come.

Our work has been presented at IdeaFest, the largest Indonesian festival for the creative industry. This year’s festival aimed to inspire people to re-examine their reality, especially from the perspective of change.

In this context, our friend Dr. Amadeus Driando, Tempe & Food Technopreneur and Co-founder of Indonesian Tempe Movement, was invited to give a talk on tempeh and its potential. He featured, among others, our work.

It is truly inspiring and gratifying for us to see our project and the values we defend have their place in events for the future of our societies in front of a large audience. We are looking forward to see this movement growing!

During his speech on “Food Security and Tempe Fermentation Driando from Tempe Movement used our necklace to explain the principles of tempe(h) fermentation and why tempe(h) should be deployed as a naturally nutritious, sustainable and affordable food.

We are very proud that our work and the values we embody are understood and used at such events to convey such an important message about the future of our food system.

Thank you Driando for this inspiring speech!

It’s been over a month that we are in Bali now and every day we’re just as pleasantly surprised at how tempe(h) is everywhere. It’s great. It’s served for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and as snacks. Everywhere, all the time.

From our discussions with locals, it is also surprising how omnipresent but unknown tempe(h) is. Unknown in the sense that very few people know what tempe(h) is made of, or how it is made, not to mention that it is a relationship between plants and fungi, and that this local superfood can be deployed worldwide using local crops, not just soy.

But I guess not really knowing what we’re eating is a problem of the last decades, and unfortunately doesn’t only apply to tempe(h). Indeed, the food industry is trying to make us eat anything with ingredients that are impossible to pronounce.

Let’s take back control of what we eat, let’s re-interested in what gives us our energy. Long live tempe(h)!

Being in Indonesia and immersing ourselves in this magnificent culture motivates us and reinforces our idea that taking control of our food, understanding what we eat and where it comes from is a key step in the fight against the climate crisis. We can adapt our habits to this changing context, and preserve our natural environment.

Let’s protect our home together!