Jacuzzi

That is the work's contradiction, and the contradiction is the work. A spontaneous act cannot be designed and staged, so Jacuzzi asks what spontaneous resistance can even look like once you have built the conditions for it. Its answer is simple and biological: resistance is what the cultivated organism does inside the apparatus that was meant to control it. The grower designs the cultivation; the organism does what the organism does. The mushrooms fruited unevenly, in places that were not planned, in colours that were not chosen. The spontaneity is theirs and the design is the artist's, and the resistance lives in the gap between what was built and what arrived.

The title sharpens the point. A jacuzzi is a brand of hot tub, an object of bourgeois leisure that promises therapeutic warm water in a controlled domestic interior, and the work borrows the name to say exactly what the apparatus is: a controlled warm-water environment that promises to domesticate an organic process. The sarcasm is structural, not glib. It names a piece of biotechnology as a leisure object, and lets the two readings sit on top of one another: the cultivation device seen through the vocabulary of consumer comfort, the laboratory dressed as a spa.

What the growth resists is the promise of predictable yield: the agricultural logic that cultivation equals controlled output, the imaginary that biology is a domesticable layer beneath human design. The substrate carries two species: Pleurotus ostreatus, chosen because it tolerates almost anything, and Cubensis Albino A+, which carries the work back into the series' lineage. Given a controlled environment, both behave with their own irregular stubbornness, refusing to yield on schedule, contaminating one another, fruiting in the seams of the substrate where the apparatus can least reach them. The resistance is literal: it is what the living thing does that the machine did not authorise.

"The work's scale is human-proportional. It could function as a bed, work surface, or display platform. This ambiguity between functional and sculptural registers is not clarified."

Critical review, 2026

The ambiguity is the position, not an oversight. The work stands at the height of a bed and asks the body to recognise it as one, then refuses the invitation: you cannot lie down, because the surface is already the body of something else, alive and at work. A bed, a cultivation table, a display platform: it is meant to be all three at once, so that the warmth, light and water a hot tub would offer a human body are seen being redirected to grow a crop instead. The viewer is left standing over a horizontal surface that is already occupied.