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A World Forms in Whispers
Sculpture, Installation
2025
Materials: Aluminium, silicone, water kefir, butterfly pea flower tea, water, gelatine, glycerine, sodium alginate, calciuym chloride, plastic, agar-agar, sugar, arduino, 12V electric pump, brass nozzles, lemon juice, salt, bacteria, yeast
Wien
Project Description
‘Otherness’ is a construct created through colonialism, mediated through technology and reinforced by neocolonialism. This construct divides the self from everything else, increasing fear of difference and the unknown. The installation initiates alternative ways to relate to other living beings by enacting relationships of growth and care which are formed with microorganisms released by the sculpture.
The structure and skin of the sculpture are made from the skeleton of a symbiotic Sea-Fan coral, a colony of multiple organisms functioning as a single animal. Originating in my home country of Antigua, it is the only species I have intimately seen re-generate through climate change. Their skeletons have been cast in the synthetic, inorganic materials used to build computers, reframing technological and biological exchange as they engage with the other organic and living elements, engendering a queer ecology of reciprocity.
The cast elements contain microorganisms called tibicos, symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast used by indigenous cultures in Central America to make a fermented health drink. Though the indigenous people of Antigua were massacred, their practice lives on within the installation, a speculative site bridging the colonial past and technological future. The organisms are released by the dissolving casts, growing in the water pool beneath which is filled with herbal tea made from the butterfly pea plant, an invasive species in the same region that the tibicos grows and originates.
The organic materials contained within the installation have all been used, misused, or displaced through colonialism, along with the microorganisms and the sugar they are fed by. All of these materials heal humans, showing that what is perceived as ‘other’ -displaced species, invasive plants, or microbial colonies- can in fact sustain and nourish life.
A series of relationships between machines, caregivers, and microorganisms support the fluid environment, facilitating the entangled processes of biology, technology, history, and climate change. ‘A World Forms in Whispers’ proposes ways we can live and regenerate collectively with the more-than-human, ultimately revealing how all states of matter and all forms of life share the same fate: one of transformation through symbiosis.