At the end of May, we got together for Sensory Week – five days of activities organised by CSSM members and collaborators, exploring different senses and how each one might allow us to know microbes. These activities went to the heart of what the Centre is all about since part of our mission is to explore and cultivate novel methods that can capture complex relations between human and nonhuman animals, microbes, and the environment. Keep reading to learn about everything we did during Sensory Week, as organisers and participants describe each workshop in their own words.
Tasting Microbes Workshop
Organised by Will LaFleur
The workshop centred on the smelling, tasting and discussion of the sensory experiences of wild and manufactured yeasts found in bread yeasts, baked bread loaves, and mead (honey wine). It was prefaced by a brief presentation on the notion that sensory experience is never given, but always produced through the socio-ecological and political-economic ways in which the world is ontogenetically made and comes into being. This notion was meant simply to prime participants for thinking about how sensuous experience (in this case produced by the yeasts and attendant microbial communities) accord to varying modalities of economic and social (re)production. The workshop was organised as a convivial, experiential setting as opposed to the kind of structured or blind tasting/smelling one might encounter in a laboratory, scientific study, or professional examinations such as those required for becoming a wine sommelier. That is, the workshop was set up with a tendency toward tasting in a setting most similar to the way food and drink are consumed on an everyday basis: as a shared and pleasurable experience where sensory experiences are discussed as memories, stories, and personal histories.
Three different smelling/tasting stations were set up. The first station featured five jars of bread yeasts (three comprised of different sourdough starters, and two additional jars contained instant yeast immersed in water, and ‘fresh’ yeast immersed in water). A second station included four different breads: three sourdough loaves and one loaf purchased from the store (and made from either fresh or instant yeast). A third station contained two bottles of mead (honey wine), one purchased from the store and fermented with laboratory-produced ‘added’ yeast, and one that was homemade with ‘wild’ yeast, meaning it was fermented from the naturally-occurring yeasts present in the honey. Participants took turns engaging and commenting on the aromatic qualities of the different bread yeasts; the looks, tastes, aromas, and textures of the different breads; and the colors, aromas and tastes of the meads.
–Will LaFleur
Capturing the Sensuous Moment: Fermentation & Prose Workshop
Organised by Minaë Tani-LaFleur and Will LaFleur
This workshop centred around fermented foods paired with Japanese “saké” – Japanese traditional alcoholic beverages made out of rice – and culminated in the collective production of Japanese prose poetry ‘haiku’. The prose aspect was a way to pay homage to the global origins of ‘higher education’, wherein the modern German university system drew from the Chinese scholarly system that had been ongoing for millennia. In this Chinese system, ‘knowledge production’ consisted of skills in writing prose and calligraphy, which in turn required a profound sensitivity to the world and its goings-on. In this workshop, participants attempted to capture, in prose, the sensory moment of the Helsinki summer atmosphere, the taste and smell of food using several fermented ingredients, as well as the alcohol that is produced through the parallel fermentation of mould (Koji), bacteria, and yeasts in the making of Japanese saké. At the end, participants took turns reading their prose out loud to the group and discussing their process.
–Will LaFleur
Choral Microbes Workshop
Organised by Jose A. Cañada, Faidon Papadakis and Jyri Pirinen
This workshop focused on using different sound techniques to stimulate conversation about relying on unusual ways to sense microbial presence in our everyday life. The workshop was originally designed by CSSM members Faidon Papadakis and Jose A. Cañada and former CSSM fellow Kaajal Modi. For Sensory Week, Faidon and Jose invited sound artist Jyri Pirinen to join them as a way to continue developing the concept. In this iteration, participants were first instructed to engage in an exercise of attentive listening, since we are used to mostly listen to the loudest sounds around us. After participants tuned into their hearing as a sense, they were instructed to use their phones and devices to record sounds they found around them and which were evoking, in one way or another, microbial presence for them. People recorded things such as a potentially viral sneeze and a baby burping during their eating session.
After the listening and recording session outdoors, participants gathered together in small groups to discuss the way listening helped them to notice microbial presence, without forgetting about the many limitations of hearing as a sense made evident during the workshop. Participants’ sounds were put into a sampler instrument connected to a video synthesizer, which was then used to manipulate the sound as a way to think of the sonic qualities and transformations that sounds undergo and which contrast with human hearing abilities. The final discussion brought up questions about how the microbial scale, visual in origin, also translates into the auditory. While we are used to thinking about microbial presence in visual or olfactory terms, the amount of “imagination” that goes into the process is not completely different from the requirement to imagine microbes before recording them.
–Jose A. Cañada
Multisensory MicrobART Walk – Forest walk
Organised by Oona Leinovirtanen, Riina Hannula and Aliisa Talja
In the morning, participants and facilitators gathered at the Rastila metro station. Aliisa shared basic information about what will happen within the next hour, and how to participate in it, and introduced the facilitators. Then the multisensory holobiont walk began. The weather was sunny and warm. There were five stops during the walk, sensitising participants to different aspects of sensing microbial life in the forest and within ourselves. The walk was mainly done in silence.
After some warm-up questions to reflect on, and familiarizing themselves with the forest environment through different senses, the group gathered in a more secluded part of the forest for an exercise. With their eyes closed, through spoken cues to move and reflect, the participants were guided to sense and reflect on their relation, exchange and entanglement with the surroundings – first the more-than-human, then the human. Finally, the facilitators guided the participants into contact with one another and the whole group sensed its way through the forest, eyes closed still, back to the gravel road.
The final passage of the walk was done as a cluster, eyes open. The participants couldn’t hold their excitement to share their experiences from the previous part, so there was a lot of lively chatter. The walk ended in front of Alma Heikkilä’s house, with the question: Where is the forest now, in the world and in your body? In a debriefing of this workshop, many participants mentioned how pleasant and taken care of they felt during the walk, and how much care there was in walking with eyes closed, hand in hand, with a group of people. All in all, the workshop was mentioned to have been a profound experience.
–Aliisa Talja
Multisensory MicrobART Walk – Alginate castings
Organised by Alma Heikkilä
Gathered in the sunny garden around planter boxes, drinking Louhisaari drink (a refreshing beverage brewed from blackcurrant leaves) and eating crackers and cookies, the CSSM artist-in-residence Alma Heikkilä gave a short talk about her artistic practice, and introduced the next workshop. In her artistic practice Alma has reflected on hands a lot, and used castings of human hands as elements of the artworks. Thus she proposed for the participants to do a casting of a self-chosen part of their hands, all of which she would then compile into an artwork that represents CSSM.
The casting took place right next to the garden, in Alma’s studio – a spacious room with materials, some art works and books about fungi and other organisms. The participants took turns in putting the mold material, alginate, into a small cup and sticking their finger(s) in it for some ten minutes. This was the most challenging part of the workshop, since it was beneficial to try and stay as still as possible during this phase. After this, fingers could be carefully slid out of the mold, and Alma started to mix gypsum for the castings. Gypsum was poured into the molds, shaken a bit, and the gypsum fingers-to-be were left in the studio to set, as the next workshop began.
–Aliisa Talja
Multisensory MicrobART Walk – Plant walk
Organised by Faidon Papadakis
At Alma’s garden, Faidon suggested sensing plants as a way of approaching microbes. Plants make for a good proxy. They are forms of life that are radically open to their other – biotic or abiotic. Being sessile, they grow in response to light and weather, to available water and soil, and stay in place while other life-forms may pass, visit or leave their mark on their bodies.
Participants were invited to approach a plant, to try to stay still next to its own stillness. Can we imagine taking root next to it? Holding this position and experiencing the world for our entire lives from there? The suggestion was to focus all available senses on vegetal life – to look at its colours, to observe its shape and contours, to touch and feel its skin, to smell it, to rub and release its oils, and even to attempt to listen to it. A particular note was made on taste: With taste, we might say, our agency breaches that of the plant. We take from it, so it would be good to make sure it is of size and abundance that it is able to give what we take. But also, with taste the plant’s agency can invade us. As we incorporate the plant other it may also do something to us. Two poisonous plants were pointed out and the exercise started. The group spread out in the garden, assuming various positions, wondering or staying still, leaning, crouching, sitting, spending time in focused silence or quiet plant-chatter.
In an interlude, we came together and discussed our impressions. Plunging hands into the soil, noticing spots (of some kind of bacterial? viral? infection) on a leaf, licking a flower, tasting dandelion leaves were some of the sensory encounters mentioned. A couple days later, in a debrief session, some more reflections: Sensing plants requires silence. A great challenge is that it requires approaching a different temporality. A great thing that it offers is a break from conceptual understanding. It’s a relational exercise. You are with someone. Given the awareness of this togetherness, people were less inclined to taste, to take. How do we eat well? asks Derrida.
With a suggestion that we all do something we didn’t do before – to go higher if we had been low, to go to a plant we did not know if before we focused on one we did know, etc. – we went for another round. In the end, we came together and tasted cold overnight infusions made from different plants found in the garden.
–Faidon Papadakis
Grounding Workshop
Organised by Salla Sariola
For this workshop, facilitated by Salla Sariola, we walked to the backyard of Unioninkatu 37, where the CSSM has acquired three planter boxes by the campus farming association. During the workshop, we got to get our hands in the soil and reflect on our experiences of gardening in a casual atmosphere.
Our first task was to remove old plants and weeds from the soil. While we were putting our hands to work, we tried to identify what had been there. We found some dried basil that wasn’t going to revive, but a “pillisipuli” – a Welsh onion – was already thriving. Participants had brought seeds with them; we laid them on the grass next to the planter boxes. After cleaning the boxes, we gathered around our collection. Those who had brought seeds took turns presenting their contribution and reflecting on where they got them and how. We learned about different ways of sourcing seeds, from saving your own seeds, to seed-libraries and seed exchange communities. Then, we all got to share about our backgrounds in gardening, from childhood memories to current gardening projects.
After some approximative planning, we planted a little bit of everything in the boxes – intuitively and in different styles and with various considerations why and how plants go together. Finally, we covered the seeds with dried leaves to protect the soil from drying out too fast and watered the boxes. Participants had a chance to discuss with each other while cleaning and planting. This was a collaborative moment in which we shared practical and conceptual knowledge, while having, throughout the workshop, the sensorial experience of handling seeds and soil.
–Madeleine Dugué
Scents-ing Microbes Workshop
Organised by Tarsh Bates and Maya Hey
The workshop began in a room prepared with educational and scent making materials. Tarsh met all at the door, greeting and explaining how to prepare for the workshop. She gave an introduction to her work and the theory and practice surrounding scent and its study. Following a prompt given to participants before the workshop began, each person introduced themselves and the microbial-scent artifact or live sample they had brought. Examples included tempeh, wine, and kombucha. From these artifacts, Maya Hey aided in making an extraction of scent using an enfleurage process. As the extraction was heating, we created a personal map of our microbial smell memories and shared our maps with the others. How do we remember scents? What do they invoke in us? How are memory and scent linked?
The second half of the workshop happened outside on a scent walk. Tarsh provided an introductory explanation of how to identify, map, and name smells in the environment. She provided a handout and we tried out the techniques in the lobby of the building before venturing out into the square. We took a short walk culminating in a park where we could explore and identify scents by their strength and what feelings they invoked in us. We concluded back in the room and each participant was given a small jar of the scent that was co-created during the workshop.
–Stefanie Fishel
