This post is my original blog post for the cultivamos cultura summer schoool 2021
Lab day 1, Cultivamos cultura Barn and Garden, Cactus Flower, Bacteria in a test tube
Working with living organisms means knowing how to keep them alive
Las day 1, Cultivamos Cultura Lab, Kitchen and Garden
Replicate the conditions where I find the organisms, take them out of their habitat, and create the closest one possible to work with them. Do humans do this with al creatures? Is this like building my own bacteria zoo? Do bacteria know that this environment is not natural?
Lab day 1, Cultivamos Cultura Barn and Kitchen
Lab day 1, Cultivamos Cultura Barn, Replicating environments
Taking other‘s environments to replicate the ones we need to make the organisms feel nurtured. This sounds familiar….
Tentacular thinking – lecture around Donna Haraway
I felt the legs of the star fish today for the first time in my life and felt their tenderness and understood their movement. I dońt know if they are called legs, because I have not yet studied star fish and I have never wondered how its tentacles/legs/feelers are called. For sure they are not called legs. What was Gaia thinking? What part of her make her evolve in these spongy wet fast moving tentacles that really dońt understand how to attach themselves to my weird palid boney hairless hand? What was the starfish telling me in its tentacular humid language?
Studio visit – Catorce
What is it that makes some animals kings, daughters, travelers and others intrudors? Roadkill? Food?
Let´s shift perspective – another´s point of view/emotion/thought/way
The ants go up and down the thread. They only see thread. It´s pink. But they only see thread. One that was put there and knotted by a human hand (and colored with pink).
The self and the non-self: Losing yourself through immortality and rejection – Talk by Marta
„Defining the question is not defining the project“ – The first step is empathy, then comes the complexity.
Finding a common baseline – thinking and talking about women and fish – talk by Christina and Kira
The sturgeon is a living fossil. An interdisciplinary being that migrates from the sea to the river for reproductive purposes. This fish is being threatened by human behavior, around the water, the sea, the river, the fish, an endangered species by our poor knowledge about its care and importance. The female sturgeon matures for reproduction when it is around 12 years old, and many times, before she can lay her first eggs, a human cuts its stomach open for caviar. We know almost nothing about this fish. How can we get to know its environment to learn how to care for it? How do we replicate it so it is perceived as home and activates the fishes homing behavior? How do we nurture it? Can we do this by not being extractivists but by observation and study?
Christinas way of analizing the sturgeon is (among others) to listen. Listen to the water and its flow. Learning how to use the river, a knowledge long lost.
Imagining/analizing/feeling Similarities between fish and women
Every animal with a bone structure has otoliths, calcium-carbonate stones inside their ears. It´s possible to know the age of the animal by taking out and studying these stones. Ear geology. Antropocentrism in the ear-geology.
We also share a side line, the lateral fascia.
Marta wished to have gills when asked about superpowers. I wished to have a fish-tale. What is the difference between a woman and a fish.
Fish-Ada – tools for becoming a fish/woman
Anthropocene
Some words – Language (lengua-tongue)
Finding, taking, transporting, exciting, placing, multiplying, observing, nurturing, caring for sea urchins and human-urchin babies
Fish women and water bodies
About eggs and female wombs
I love you because you are delicious, I don’t because you are sticky
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BIOFRICTION — HANGAR, BARCELONA
The Wetlab — wet, humid, fluid, flow, slimy, sticky, dirty, sloggy, dripping
Taxonomy
Identify, classify, categorize, name. The human need to understand, give a name, label, compare to and look for ways in which an organism can be useful. How can I hack taxonomy? Where, in this hacked taxonomy can I find the fish/woman?
No need to classify any Fish/woman
Samples for Queer Atlas
DIY HYBRID ARTS AND WATER
Radical ecologies – Art Lab Berlin Artscience River project – DIY Hack the Panke WATER ECOLOGIES De-construction in times of climate change Fara Peluso – symbiosis human/algae through accesories that enables respiration for both human and plant WHAT LIVES IN THE RIVER IN A MICRO-LEVEL? CO-EXISTENCE OF MICROPLASTICS AND ORGANISMS Replicating the environment of microbes in the river (or in the contaminated river, in the stinky river, in the bad water, how to replicate it, are there organisms whose lives depend on the contamination of the water?)
Excursion to Besós River — pollution analysis
IMVEC — the institute for grassroots monitoring of contaminated areas
Non-humans living amongst human contamination
