cultured colonies-colonial cultures 1 (artist: Leora Farber)
The artwork was made in a PC2 microbiology laboratory, using an experimental combination of artmaking and scientific practices. The photographic image depicts a cast of a small bowl and a dinner plate, made from a solidified mixture of agar and bacterial nutrient, onto which live, naturally pigmented, mildly pathogenic bacteria have been painted. Inscribed into, imprinted onto, or infused with the translucent jelly-like substrate, the bacteria grow unpredictably, and often uncontrollably, in response to the patterns or surface applications that I attempt to create for them. Rather than being the product of my creative efforts alone, the work is made through a process of organic collaboration between the bacteria and myself; they happen ‘with’ the agencies of the microbes in a dynamic process of exchange. I am constantly fascinated by the extraordinary creative abilities of my collaborators and their ingenious growth patterns.
The casts create a semblance of presence, of immediacy, of touch, yet also point to absence. They read as if they have been made of layers of exposed subcutaneous tissue. Devoid of the body’s protective epidermis, they are materially corporeal yet also eerie and spectral. Ethereal and ephemeral, they appear to be in varying states of decay. While they are preserved in the photographic moment, in actuality, although the bacteria’s growth has been chemically curtailed and thus ‘contained’, their agar surfaces are susceptible to contamination from eukaryotic micro-organisms such as fungi, yeasts and mould.
Although they are fairly ubiquitous, the styling, design and patterning of the bowl and plate bear similarities to those found in ranges of English Bone China. Reproductions of the original designs of the cast objects, and the originals that still exist, have become domestic ‘classics’ in many global post-colonies: in their reference to upper-class tastes and values, they have also become signifiers of middle-class consumption and status, and often act as markers of gentility or respectability. Through these precarious ‘things’ that are barely things, one is invited to try and grasp the ungraspable – fugitive, fragmented remembrances of familiarity, strangeness, comfort, dis-ease, intimacy, distance, vulnerability, trauma, complicity and loss.
The casts could also be read as spectral traces of colonial legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations in post-colonial contexts such as South Africa. They carry resonances of British Imperialism and colonialism the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital through trade between Europe and Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Sugar, tea, porcelain and other luxury goods were commodities of colonial commerce that the British East India Company shipped from Asia to Europe alongside enslaved peoples, themselves considered fungible objects of trade. Marking the dawn of a globalised world, trade created a market for cultural capital, leading to the consumption of household goods by the middle classes. If read against this historical backdrop of dispossession, exploitation, displacement and precarity, the ‘casts-as-cultivated-cultures’ may be seen as uncanny spectres of disquietude or vestiges of violence that, even in their states of demise, continue to inhabit the present.
cultured colonies-colonial cultures 1 (artist: Leora Farber)
The artwork was made in a PC2 microbiology laboratory, using an experimental combination of artmaking and scientific practices. The photographic image depicts a cast of a small bowl and a dinner plate, made from a solidified mixture of agar and bacterial nutrient, onto which live, naturally pigmented, mildly pathogenic bacteria have been painted. Inscribed into, imprinted onto, or infused with the translucent jelly-like substrate, the bacteria grow unpredictably, and often uncontrollably, in response to the patterns or surface applications that I attempt to create for them. Rather than being the product of my creative efforts alone, the work is made through a process of organic collaboration between the bacteria and myself; they happen ‘with’ the agencies of the microbes in a dynamic process of exchange. I am constantly fascinated by the extraordinary creative abilities of my collaborators and their ingenious growth patterns.
The casts create a semblance of presence, of immediacy, of touch, yet also point to absence. They read as if they have been made of layers of exposed subcutaneous tissue. Devoid of the body’s protective epidermis, they are materially corporeal yet also eerie and spectral. Ethereal and ephemeral, they appear to be in varying states of decay. While they are preserved in the photographic moment, in actuality, although the bacteria’s growth has been chemically curtailed and thus ‘contained’, their agar surfaces are susceptible to contamination from eukaryotic micro-organisms such as fungi, yeasts and mould.
Although they are fairly ubiquitous, the styling, design and patterning of the bowl and plate bear similarities to those found in ranges of English Bone China. Reproductions of the original designs of the cast objects, and the originals that still exist, have become domestic ‘classics’ in many global post-colonies: in their reference to upper-class tastes and values, they have also become signifiers of middle-class consumption and status, and often act as markers of gentility or respectability. Through these precarious ‘things’ that are barely things, one is invited to try and grasp the ungraspable – fugitive, fragmented remembrances of familiarity, strangeness, comfort, dis-ease, intimacy, distance, vulnerability, trauma, complicity and loss.
The casts could also be read as spectral traces of colonial legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations in post-colonial contexts such as South Africa. They carry resonances of British Imperialism and colonialism the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital through trade between Europe and Asia from the 16th to the 18th centuries. Sugar, tea, porcelain and other luxury goods were commodities of colonial commerce that the British East India Company shipped from Asia to Europe alongside enslaved peoples, themselves considered fungible objects of trade. Marking the dawn of a globalised world, trade created a market for cultural capital, leading to the consumption of household goods by the middle classes. If read against this historical backdrop of dispossession, exploitation, displacement and precarity, the ‘casts-as-cultivated-cultures’ may be seen as uncanny spectres of disquietude or vestiges of violence that, even in their states of demise, continue to inhabit the present.