Serpentine Compendium: Microbial Lore

23 Sept

‘Compendium’ is the result of a collective knowledge-making process I took part in from March 2022 to February 2023. Conceived, curated, and led by the Synthetic Ecologies Lab at Serpentine Galleries, a pioneering contemporary art museum in London, Compendium aims to support artistic and critical inquiry into ecology and the life sciences. By bringing together artists, designers, scientists, and researchers to pool their perspectives, the project creates an interactive transdisciplinary web tool that offers curious users diverse entry points into a given topic in the field of Synthetic Ecologies.

The first season of Compendium, ’Microbial Lore’, focussed on fermentation and the smaller scales of life: not only in food and cooking, but across science, technology, history, and culture. Alongside the project’s truly transdisciplinary team of artists, designers, researchers and writers from and associated with Serpentine, I was one of five guest contributors with a different approach to fermentation in their own practice. The team met once every few weeks over the project period, sharing materials, ideas, and stories and gradually populating them into the web platform. Out of our conversations, four key themes began to emerge: ‘Cellular Trompe L’Œil’, ‘Sensory Intimacy’, ‘Non-Linear Temporalities’, and ‘Stewards of Knowledge’, which help structure the Compendium. By navigating the annotated entries—notes, photos, videos, songs, research papers, recipes, cartoons, and more—across these four interconnected themes, users can assemble and share their own ‘Collections’, new paths through similar terrain.

For me, being part of Compendium was enriching not only because of the result, which I find beautiful, deliberated, and engaging, but also because of the process. It felt truly trans-disciplinary—not only multi-, in which disciplines assemble but don’t interact, or even inter-, in which they interact but remain unchanged by each other, but thoroughly trans-, in which we all met each other in an open, vulnerable, humble way, ready to learn from and be transformed by each other’s knowledges and their implications. That is beautiful and, I think, rare. It is a testament to the careful, sensitive leadership of the director of the project, Yasaman, and the guest curator for the first season, Angela, who were so attuned to and skilled in how to cultivate a space where this kind of interaction is possible. Accordingly, they had, with similar thoughtfulness, assembled a truly diverse and inclusion-minded crew, which also enabled this kind of transdisciplinary experience, and made the whole process and result so rich and powerful. I learned a lot about how to try to cultivate this kind of space just by listening and noticing how everyone interacted, and how Yasaman and Angela guided the process as they did.

Beyond that, it was also just great to get to hang out with and learn from some fascinating and remarkable people. I loved getting to think with familiar materials around my and others’ natural- and social-scientific work on fermentation, more-than-human theory, taste, the Anthropocene, history of science etc. in a more artistic context. Doing so also helped me think about the complexities of fermentation beyond the food context, for example in the creation of biomaterials or the production of single molecules in precision fermentation, and what changes in how we should think about fermentation in these other sites.

There are a few things I particularly love about this project as a form of public engagement. One is its attention and commitment to what might often be termed ‘aesthetics’—recognising that, like the senses, the ‘form’ of something matters at least as much as the ‘content’, so we may as well try to engage them both with thought. Related is how it valued creativity, open-endedness, exploration, and play—values we in SFI share, in our research and our approach to public engagement. Finally, I found it invigorating to be in company who share interests in working across, questioning, and even sometimes, when required, collapsing distinctions between high and low culture, science and non-science, humans and other species, indeed ‘form’ and ‘content’, and other such pesky, persistent, purportedly transcendental dyads. I hope we might continue to find these things in future projects as they unfold.

Compendium is led by Yasaman Sheri, Principal Investigator of the Synthetic Ecologies Lab. Compendium: Microbial Lore was guest-curated by chef and artist Angela Dimayuga, with contributions by historian Nadia Berenstein, scientist Namita Patel, artist Lucy Chinen, designer Seetal Solanki, and me. The process was supported by Serpentine producer Alex Boyes, researcher Chiara Di Leone, writer Claire Evans, and web designer Charles Broskoski, co-founder of Are.na, the platform that hosts Compendium. The Compendium website was created by designer Mindy Seu, artist Somnath Bhatt, typeface designer Brian Huddleston, and web developer James Wreford.