After the Ruins of Milk
January - June 2025, Rotterdam
Milk is more than just a drink
This project examines how modernist ideals of cleanliness, control, and hygiene continue to shape our environments—and how these values parallel the spatial and cultural implications of milk as a processed substance. In a reconstruction of the dining room from Huis Sonneveld, an icon of Dutch modernism, the installation reintroduces microbial life onto the 1924 Berlage-Zwart tableware. Once symbols of rational order and sanitary living, the table and its contents become a site of decay and milk’s transformation
By cultivating mold and revealing processes of decomposition, the work disrupts the utopian vision of modernism. It questions how pasteurization, cleaning rituals, and antimicrobial protocols might also function as forms of cultural and ecological suppression.
Through rot, growth, and contamination, the installation invites reflection on other possible forms of coexistence—including with what we are taught to sterilize, reject, or fear.
Photo’s by: Silvia Arena
