Are you interested in Fermentation? In this workshop we will collaboratively explore microbes as heirlooms that are passed down intergenerationally from our ancestors through the practices of fermentation and storytelling as recovery in our respective geographies. This collection will be used to develop a ’care package’ that will be shared at the bacteria bar at the Bie biennial on June 29, 2024.
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As ancestors, allies, and symbiotes, microbes have lived alongside us as long as we have lived. Human bodies are holobionts composed of a host and trillions of microorganisms whose collective functioning keeps the whole alive. Human symbioses with microorganisms are an important adaptation and survival strategy that have shaped us and the world around us in important and meaningful ways. Yet, like many forms of biodiversity, microbiodiversity is under threat from climate change, an increasingly industrialised food system, and the concurrent loss of land-based knowledge about heritage food practices.
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As ancestors, allies, and symbiotes, microbes have lived alongside us as long as we have lived. Human bodies are holobionts composed of a host and trillions of microorganisms whose collective functioning keeps the whole alive. Human symbioses with microorganisms are an important adaptation and survival strategy that have shaped us and the world around us in important and meaningful ways. Yet, like many forms of biodiversity, microbiodiversity is under threat from climate change, an increasingly industrialised food system, and the concurrent loss of land-based knowledge about heritage food practices.
Microbial inheritance happens both vertically through genetic inheritance, and horizontally through the stories, foods, and cultural practices that we inherit through which we can trace the ways humans have been entangled with microorganisms.
ABOUT BIE BIENNAL 2024:
This year’s Bie Biennal KEEP TURNING delves into questions surrounding fermentation, bacterial culture, and the art of creating and sustaining communities. We do this in an increasingly fragmented, socially distant, and over-sanitized world with the hope to create a biennial that enables moments of getting together. Allowing our communities to change, ferment and turn. KEEP TURNING employs fermentation as an artistic and socio-economic model and is grounded in principles of collectivity, the economics of sharing, politics of hosting and being a guest, as well as experimentation, sharing, and learning exercises.
This year’s Bie Biennal KEEP TURNING delves into questions surrounding fermentation, bacterial culture, and the art of creating and sustaining communities. We do this in an increasingly fragmented, socially distant, and over-sanitized world with the hope to create a biennial that enables moments of getting together. Allowing our communities to change, ferment and turn. KEEP TURNING employs fermentation as an artistic and socio-economic model and is grounded in principles of collectivity, the economics of sharing, politics of hosting and being a guest, as well as experimentation, sharing, and learning exercises.
Unlike previous editions of the Bie biennal, Keep Turning takes place publicly in Bie for one day and night on June 29, 2024. But the biennial will also keep turning, therefore continually fermenting, until the next version of the Bie Biennale in 2026.
See: https://www.biebiennal.se/ for more info.
The talk with Kaajal Modi is an initiative by a collective of artists, writers, poets, farmers, curators, designers, activists, and herbalists, including Jessie Breslau, Xiyao Chen, Grace Denis, Kibandu Pello Esso, Jean Ni, Cassidy McKenna, Birgitta Schwansee, Karl Schoeberl, Nickie Sigurdsson and Jens Strandberg
Dr Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working through creative practices that explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) can be a way to open up new speculations on how we might live more fruitfully and generatively with each across all of our differential relationalities. Their practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates fermenting, cooking, image making, live art, sound, video and interaction to facilitate lively and situated encounters between people, organisms and ecosystems in ways that invite critical reflection and action. Kaajal is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Anthropocene Encounters at the Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre at the University of York.