This is an exhibition dedicated to the many non-human and non-life forms that materially and affectively shape the way I think, with whom I think-with. Heavily featuring the SCOBY (symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast) that taught me the affection of touch, to embody Octavia Butler’s words “All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you.”
Fermentation has thoroughly changed the way I think about agency, where is it located? Who does it belong to? “Me” or “my microbes”? My microbes? Can the two ever be distinct from, outside of, each other?
Human beings originated from a primordial intrusion of alterity, but we did not learn to live symbiotically. We celebrate the cult of individualism, we fear the foreign. The etymology of “alien” is “originating from another,” we are all alien— infiltrated with star dust and contaminated by another’s will to be.
