Moonshiners is a collaborative, long lasting performance involving an international team running a mysterious production unit. The action gravitates around an ancestral fungi called aspergillus oryzae, Koji in japanese. Somewhere between a saké brewery and a survivalist fiction, Le projet.

We believe in the existence of strong analogies between friendship, entrepreneurship and fermentation, considering Le Projet as a whole symbiotic environment needing time, trust and energy.

This idea is developped by our communication office under the form of «the desk of explanations». That desk takes place in a greenhouse designed by professor & artist Xinke Yu where she performs consultations sharing the singularity and the quality of her point of view on the project, on life and on the universe. Friendship is a central node in our team; we value trust, patience, warm fellowship as essential elements. Saké making remains a hard, time-consuming work, requiring self-involvement and a high maintenance. Our production range is based on a recipe mixing a Korean rustic saké (makgeolli) and a Japanese one (doburoku). We prefer to use locally produced beer yeasts, sometimes harvested directly from the bottles. The purpose of our work is therefore an hybridization between different cultural approaches of some very similar products. However, the Project deploys itself as a simulacrum of business. Apart from the «regular» saké production line, there’s a research and developement unit in charge of the design of the containers, the marketing strategy, the creation of new recipes, the recycling / upcycling of byproducts.

Our experimentations are often conducted following a scenario of an economical collapse : we use lowgrade or industrial empty calorie food as well as local vegetables. Starch sources such as corn flakes, chocolate cereals, potatoes, sweet potato or flavorings like coca zero, cherry juice or celery. Starchier vegetables are used as a substrate to grow koji and develop new flavors, while other ones are burried into our sake lees to ferment. We also got a canteen where those vegetables are skillfully prepared by our Chef Mr Barry. The sound part of the project is held by Matt Subjex, a sound designer. He uses fermentation activity like burps and bubbles in order to trigger signals in a MaxMSP program that generates a quadriphonic soundtrack during the performance. This life generated composition surrounds our own working activity, somewhere between muzaak & team-building, uniting micro & macro workers.