30.10.2025 13:00 — 17:00

Location: SOLU (Panimokatu 1, 00580 Helsinki, 3rd floor,)

SOLU Dialogues: How to grow a pair of shoes
with Alan Bulfin

In this iteration of SOLU dialogues, Alan Bulfin facilitates a drop by workshop sharing his durational research working with scoby, a material grown in kombucha tea, to make a pair of shoes.

Bulfin will demonstrate how to grow a pair of shoes and invite an open dialogue on the project and process. Participants will receive their own jar of active culture to care for and grow their own kombucha leather shoes with. This knowledge and recipe sharing gives the tools to put what is learnt to use and to imagine other uses for this biomaterial.

The event takes place between 13:00-17:00 and you are welcome to drop by anytime in this period.

SOLU Dialogues is an ongoing event series by Bioart Society where art, science and society meet. Through varying formats artists, scientists and other practitioners are invited to present and discuss their work with an emphasis on research in process/public.

Alan Bulfin concentrates on site-specific process-art and performance art. Bulfin works collectively using process-based art in the public realm. He is working towards a public space that is sustained by generosity. How to materialize generous autonomy in public? How are we consumed by the world as we consume it? Bulfin’s projects are using art that has a small ecological footprint, using biodegradable materials and actions that are welcoming in their hospitality for all. They are telling stories about home, homeliness and hopefulness. Bulfin also works with public spaces in need of ecological restoration or common historical sites that have fallen into disrepair and transforms them into locations for artistic work and thinking, to revitalise their shared impact. Bulfin supports other art practices by producing the ecological art events Senses of Sustenance (SoS).