Zuzana Gombosová
Zuzana Gombosová (1988, Michalovce, Slovakia) is a material designer, researcher and co-founder of Malai Biomaterials, where since 2017 she has been developing biomaterials based on bacterial cellulose and biocomposites in India. She holds an MA in Material Futures from Central Saint Martins, London. Her practice connects material experimentation, biological processes and design thinking with local resources, craft practices and cultural contexts. She is interested in how new biofabricated materials can not only be technologically developed, but also find a place within existing material cultures. By exploring local techniques, seasonal rhythms, ways of using materials and their cultural meanings, she creates new connections between materials generated through biological processes and specific places.
Terroir Materials: Fermentation Ecosystems and Care-Based Design of Living Biomaterials
The research explores how design can work with biofabricated materials whose properties and forms emerge through biological, environmental and technological processes. It builds on the author’s long-term practical experience with bacterial cellulose, including its cultivation, processing and functional modification. Material is not understood here as passive matter to be shaped, but as a system that develops through interactions between microorganisms, the environment, time and human care.
The specific research case is winemaking fermentation ecosystems as environments for the experimental cultivation and design of bacterial-cellulose-based materials. The research investigates how local resources, by-products of grape processing, microbial communities and practices associated with winemaking can influence the cultivation, properties and resulting form of bacterial cellulose. The concept of terroir is used here as a way of understanding material as an outcome of relationships between local resources, organisms, environments, human knowledge and practices of care.
Through experiments, material prototypes and design practice, the research examines the relationship between biological processes and material experience. It explores how cultivation conditions, local resources, fermentation environments, plant-based substances and processing methods influence the resulting properties and behaviour of the material. The research also includes the development of a material library and the documentation of different material trajectories as tools for design decision-making. Its aim is to develop design methods that move beyond the control and optimisation of materials and instead engage with their variability, relationality and temporal development.