Workshop with Ieva Maslinskaitė
In collaboration with Audronė Maslinskienė
20 December 2022, 19:30-21:30
BVenue: SODAS 2123 Alt Lab (Vitebsko g. 23, III a.)
What is it like to live in a Petri dish? How to bring the human experience closer to a non-human experience, accepting and embracing vulnerability through the microbial self? How can the understanding of self as a microbial community cultivate a more communal feeling between self and the other, self and environment?
In a ritualistic way, the workshop aims to rethink human and non-human relationships by growing a community Petri dish, to start a conversation and activate the community to grow a non-human community together. Blurring the formal boundaries and scientific preconceptions of a Petri dish, participants are invited to contribute with swabs of their bodies to the growth media in the custom petri dishes, repeating the action until all petri dishes had contributions from all the participants’ bodies:
After the workshop, the collected micro-communities will be grown in Alt Lab where their non-humans will be identified by a microbiologist Audronė Maslinskienė. The participants will be updated about their growing communities with findings and photographic documentation via newsletters.
The workshop will eventually result in a look-back publication based on the documentation of the workshop, growing micro-communities, microbiologist findings, and newsletters on growing communities to participants.
Supported by: Lithuanian Council for Culture
Organised by: Institutio Media in collaboration with Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Union.
Ieva Maslinskaitė is an interdisciplinary artist making work around (queer) ecology. Driven by the belief that moving towards being ecological requires destabilizing our binary thinking towards the environment, her interest lies in co-creating with other species, such as microorganisms or fungi, organic and artificial processes to make temporary and mutating installations, sculptures, and other image-based works.
Audronė Maslinskienė is a microbiologist and grandmother of Ieva. Her practice centers around the research on microorganisms producing enzymes that can be used in broader production, she has worked in a lab dedicated to microorganisms’ genetics and selection.