Exactly what one experienced in the Festival Headquarters of VIENNA DESIGN WEEK 2020 naturally depended upon the timing of one’s visit. There were days when someone was cooking in the courtyard but others when someone was bathing there. More precisely, in a large tub that is actually used in the production of cheese. The bathing events were performances connected with the project KITCHENBATH by Anastasia Eggers and Philipp Kolmann, which combined the culture of the body with cheesemaking in the context of URBAN FOOD & DESIGN. Wellness treatments based on dairy products were already common in antiquity! In homage to Cleopatra’s milk baths, KITCHENBATH created a shared domestic setting for both culinary and cosmetic processes: The kitchen and bathroom became one, as a means of combining the effect of the bacteria that are used in food production and in connection with hygiene routines. For example, the protein created in cheesemaking was used to prepare baths, which supply activating lactobacilli to our microbiome (the entirety of all microorganisms that are naturally carried by a multicellular creature). Hence, at the ideological level, the project also automatically addressed the ever stricter hygiene rules in food production, with its constant mantra of: more sterile, more homogenized, and less local. And yet, according to all those whose aim is to keep alive the century-old know-how about bacterial cultures and trades such as cooperage or barrel-making, which is based on precisely this symbiosis of water, protein, and wood, this is all nonsense – or, as the Austrians say, ‘all cheese’. The project was realized in cooperation with the Werkraum Bregenzerwald and the barrel-maker Peter Lässer.