Workshop with artist Ieva Maslinskaitė: Microbial Selves

2022-12-15

On Tuesday, the 20^th December at 19.30 Ieva Maslinskaitė will host a workshop on microbial self-understanding Microbial Selves in the Alt Lab non-disciplinary research laboratory (Vitebsko g. 23, 3rd floor, Vilnius), cultural complex SODAS 2123.

Artist raises questions: 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.

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.

Workshop date: 20 December, 19:30-21:30
The event will take place in the Alt Lab (Vitebsko g. 23, 3rd floor), SODAS 2123 cultural complex.

Registration at o-o@o-o.lt
More information at http://www.o-o.lt

Admission is free and the event will be held in Lithuanian.
Duration: 2 hours.

The event is organised by Institutio Media in cooperation with the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association. The project is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.