Tractora Koop is thrilled to invite you to the opening of Mute Track, an exhibition by artist Bianca Hlywa, on Saturday, September 20, 2025, starting at 12:00 p.m. at ATOI: Calle Iparragirre 66, Bilbao.
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We first got to know the work of Bianca Hlywa, a Canadian artist based in London, in 2019, before the pandemic and even before we opened Atoi. Bianca was already at that time working with SCOBY—an acronym for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast—commonly known as kombucha fungus, a probiotic drink that has become popular in the West in recent years. SCOBY grows as an air-liquid interface, a cellulose-structured film in which microorganisms, bacteria, and yeasts coexist and work together to ferment sweet tea and sugar.
Bianca grows and manipulates SCOBY on a large scale, a formal operation that poses a perceptual, aesthetic challenge. As the SCOBY grows, the first film becomes thicker and transforms into a gelatinous, beige-colored, thick microbial layer that resembles flesh and is visually difficult to classify as life or non-life. The transformation Bianca subjects the domestic SCOBY to produces an estrangement that is extensible to fungi, bacteria, yeasts, and microbial life who are generally omnipresent in our bodies and/or the environment. All of them are often invisible, so when they grow and reach human scale, they become radically unfamiliar to us. Bianca uses this ambiguity to challenge pre-established categories and boundaries, practising an interrogative intimacy with a potentially repulsive and non-human ‘other’.
Bianca uses robotic mechanisms to activate the SCOBYs in her installations. Industrial control allows her to animate them and thus engage in a dialogue with the tradition of the exhibition space as a place of stillness where stable, inert, and recognizable objects are displayed. On previous occasions, the neatness of the white cube has also favored a certain distancing. Unlike them, the adaptation of the installation we have conceived together with Bianca brings this last contextualisation operation into play.
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Bianca Hlywa (Canada, 1992) is an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Concordia University, Montreal, CA (2015) and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goldsmiths, University of London (2019). Her solo exhibition, Residual Yeast, was selected by London critics at Art Forum and reviewed in Art Monthly and Flash Art. Bianca has exhibited internationally in museums and galleries. Her solo shows include Gossamer Fog, London, UK; Barbican Arts Group Trust, London, UK; Verticale Artist Run Center, Quebec, Canada; The Young Artist Association, Budapest, Hungary; The Drawward Project, Montreal, Canada; St. Chads Projects, London; and Sismógrafo, Porto. She has participated in group exhibitions at the National Art Gallery in Warsaw, Poland; Teknisk Museum, Oslo, Norway; Gallery of Alberta Media Arts, Calgary, Canada; VITRINE Gallery, London, UK; The Fairest, Berlin, Germany; PHI center, Montreal, Canada; and FOFA Gallery, Montreal, Canada. She has received several awards and grants, including the New Frontiers Award for Research (2023), Elephant Trust (2022), the Canadian Council for Art (2022), The Alberta Foundation for the Arts (2020), The Arts Council England (2021), The Barbican Arts Group Trust (2018), Goldsmiths University (2017-2019), and the John J.A. and Cecil Murphy Awards and the AAVA Video Award (2015).
Tractora Koop. is an artists’ cooperative founded in 2013 as a tool for the production of the projects of its members, a group of artists who participated in each other’s works on a regular basis. The cooperative, as a legal entity, was born with a purpose of infrastructure. Its corporate form was borrowed from truckers cooperatives; its name, Tractora, is a tribute to them. In its eleven years of life Tractora has tractioned numerous projects that have resulted as fruitful in a wide variety of disciplines. As of 2018 the initial activity of the cooperative has expanded to the production of collective projects, in which its various members participate and from which several programmatic lines are born: the review of related artistic trajectories with long-term projects (such as Landa Lan: A Documentation of Darcy Lange), a publishing house (-zko), a platform for cataloging and dissemination of artist publications called Sistema Eragilea. Atoi opened in 2021, from where the programs of Barrunbe, Kinu and Foku are developed.
Labayru Market is one of six municipal markets still open in Bilbao. It has been operating since 1966, almost 60 years. It is located at 8 Labayru Street, and also has entrances at 66 Iparraguirre Street and 1 Ávila Street. It has a surface area of 2,264 m², of which 800 m² belong to the commercial area. Currently, five of the original 65 stalls remain in operation. All of them offer fresh, seasonal products to a varied and loyal clientele.
Design and production management: Usue Arrieta and Ainara Elgoibar | Financing coordination and production support: Marina Arranz | Fabrication of metal structures and installation: Adrián Castañeda | Engineering and coding: Andrew Dixon | Production assistant: Gerard Ortín Castellví | Installation assistants: Joey Ordóñez, Valentín Ramos and Andoni Zamora | Metalwork and engine casing design: Robert McLeod | Research into improving the mechanical properties of SCOBY and its growth has received support and collaboration from: KSIgune Konexioak and BCMaterials (Basque Centre for Materials, Applications and Nanostructures) and Basque Biodesign Center | Exhibition organised in collaboration with the Labayru Market | Transfer of industrial cleaning machinery: Sumigas | Project in cooperation with: St. Chads Projects y Sismografo | Special thanks to: Jorge Latas | Silvia Coppola | EHU Zientzia eta Teknologia fakultatea | Eskerrik asko danoi.
This project is funded by the Department of Culture and Language Policy of the Basque Government.
