Ferment Radio

Garden. It invites us to sit down and watch things grow. It makes us work with gazillions of other species to make them flourish. Silent observation or site-specific, mindful labor can be a form of wondering: seeing magic in what’s common and perceiving what’s repetitive with new eyes.

This is how Noora Sandgren, a visual artist and art educator from Finland, works in her family garden. She collaborates with climates, insects, and expired light-sensitive material to create cameraless photograms of shared chemistry of composting organic matter, microbes, human breaths, and sunlight.

In this episode, Noora takes us to her garden where she wonders while taking lensless images and patiently waits for long exposures for the magic to happen.

We associate these institutions with petrified displays, and long-gone worlds that are alien to our own experience: museums. Whether we like it or not, they play a crucial role in preserving heritage.

Can heritage be something alive and ever changing? It seems that yes. At least ARTIS-Micropia, a one-of-a-kind museum showing the invisible world of micro-organisms, is doing that. ARTIS-Micropia is a museum in Amsterdam in which visitors can learn more information about microbes, and see live microbes on display too.

The museum fills a gap between the general public’s knowledge on microroganisms, and the science behind microbiology. “Unknown is unloved” they say on their webpage, and they definitely want to change that.

On Ferment Radio’s new episode, we talk with ARTIS-Micropia’s lab technicians Loek van Buuren and Eline van Bloois about curating microbes, preserving what is alive, and dreaming about immersive microscopial experiences, which could allow us to float with microbes in their micro universe.

Can we intentionally influence our nervous system through what we do? If so, could we also activate the main nerve of our parasympathetic nervous system known as vagus nerve?  This is the central communication pathway between the gut and the brain, and between microbiota and our nervous system. Could we interact with our gut microbiota and our gut microbiota interact with us?

In this episode of Ferment Radio, together with Riina Hannula, we start with Microbial Medi(t)ation, an instructional audio that guides us through selected movements from yin- and hatha yoga to stimulate the vagus nerve. With this meditation, we wonder if it is possible to embody scientific facts and if our well-being involves the well-being of our microscopic companions as well.

Riina Hannula, an artist and doctoral student in sociology at The Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki,  studies humans as holobionts from a gut-brain-axis point of view and looks into how microbes think, feel, and behave with humans.

We communicate with the outside world based on the information we receive through our senses. But just like fingerprints, no two people have the same brain anatomy, and therefore, no two people can sense the world identically. We can’t experience how other bodies feel, but we can attempt to describe it.

Today, together with Pia Lindman, an artist and researcher working with performance art, healing-as-art, installation, microbes, architecture, painting, and sculpture, we dive into the uniqueness of bodily experiences; even those caused by microorganisms. Pia calls this, the subsensorial.

Through language, we not only reflect our relationship with the world but also shape it. For example, what does the conviction that we need to “exterminate all superbugs” tell us about humans? Could it be that antimicrobial resistance, which causes antibiotics to become ineffective against microbial infections, is in part driven by a human desire to separate human from nature and eradicate what is ‘impure’, different, or misunderstood?

On the 30th episode of Ferment Radio, together with Iona Walker, a medical anthropologist living and working in Edinburgh, Scotland, we search for different perspectives on this alarming issue and find inspiration in books, art, films, and poetry.

We look for cracks, soft spots, and ambiguities to unlearn what we think we know for sure and exercise a new language that could help reshape our relationship with the world, including microbes. Join us in this exciting conversation!

On Ferment Radio, we have often talked about how artists use technology and science in order to tackle the microbial world. Do you remember the episode “Play that fungi music!” with Tosca Terán? Or “Interspecies collaborations” with Mindaugas Gapševičius? Some people refer to this kind of practice as “bioart”: the happy place where experimentation and process are more important than concrete results.

Our guest today is Laura Beloff, an artist, and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Laura is also an associate Professor, and Head of the Visual Cultures, Curating, and Contemporary Art Program (VICCA) at Aalto University, in Helsinki, Finland. On this episode of Ferment Radio,  we will delve into the dynamic interdisciplinary niche that likes to collaborate with microbes; reflect on the ethics of working with living organisms; and discuss the incompatibility of a creative endeavor within a neoliberal reality. Oh, and we will also talk about ticks!

As Laura Beloff points out: artists are antennas for societal moods, and there is a reason why they engage with microbes. And what’s the reason?

Stick around and tune into the 29th episode of Ferment Radio to find out!

We use them all the time. Metaphors allow us to make sense of things we cannot comprehend. What metaphors do we commonly use to understand microbes? Bacteria are bugs, and we certainly are at war with them. Such a stand contributes greatly to our antagonistic relationship with microbes. But, can we revalue our relationship with microbes through metaphors? Could metaphors help us reconsider habits and economies related to our co-existing with bacteria, particularly something as serious as anti-microbial resistance? In this episode of Ferment Radio, we look for answers to these questions with Jessica Maccaro, a PhD candidate at the McFrederick Lab, University of California, Riverside, working with insects, fungi, and science communication.

In 2015, while in grad school, Cecilia Westbrook made yogurt out of her vaginal flora, as an experimental side-project. A journalist friend of hers wrote about it, and the article got published on Vice. It immediately went viral, spawning a number of copy-cat publications that re-edited the original text but never added more content, let alone created space for dialogue or reflection.

This situation caused problems with her academic institution, since at the moment she was undergoing PhD studies, and triggered a landslide of misogynistic remarks towards her, many of which can still be found online. For these reasons, she had to refuse to comment on the harmless, yet (for some people) controversial yogurt.

Now, 7 years after, Ferment Radio has the great pleasure to learn more about that particular yogurt,  and the avalanche it caused, directly from Cecilia Westbrook.