MotM Workshops

Micro Worlds is a speculative workshop, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to explore the multiple ways in which museums and their collections can function as sites to better understand our relationship with microbial worlds. What if, we want to ask, we were to think about museum collections not just as cultural or artistic objects, but also as equivalent to microbiological labs or as spaces for the cultivation of small beings?

Max Planck institute for the history of science: The Body of Animals. I Participated in the research group The Body of Animals in 2018-2019.

Cosmological Gardens: Land, Cultivation, and Care is the first in an ongoing series of workshops and projects by the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR) in partnership with the Associazone Culturale Matilde Pianciani, Spoleto, Italy.

“Advocating the credo “science is fiction,” Painlevé managed to scandalize both the scientific and the cinematographic world with a cinema designed to entertain as well as edify. He portrayed sea horses, vampire bats, skeleton shrimps, and fanworms as endowed with human traits – the erotic, the comical, and the savage. Painlevé single-handedly established a unique kind of cinema, the “scientific-poetic cinema”.”

This invitation to my colleagues in Microbes on the Mind kicked off two workshops with the method memory-work. The workshop course was a test-run of the memory-work method, an experiment and an engagement with Medical Museion’s exhibition Mind the Gut.

Bring your own human. This was the instruction (and name) for our workshop in September 2019. It is a simple, short and sophisticated instruction. As soon as you start thinking more about what to do, several questions quickly loom over you. Are you going to bring a fully-grown human or a human that just started walking on its own? Will you bring an entire human or maybe just a microbe on its pinky finger? Maybe you would rather like to convey a feeling of being human or let your audience become aware of the fact that they are humans experiencing right now.