STILLLEBEN with Symbionts

Abstract

‘STILLLEBEN. Becoming Symbionts’ proposes to value milk and its microbial constituents as primordial assets and currencies - along with cells, sperm, blood, water, and oxygen. The latest scientific research, which has suggested that there is an intimate unseen interplay between mothers and their babies via the transfer of breast milk and microbes, which actually increases the value of the currency with each exchange. The co-operation of Irini Athanassakis and David Berry is an invitation to perceive the transfer of milk not only as an interaction visible to the naked eye, but also on the microscopic level of cells and bacteria. In order to challenge us with this unseen perspective, Athanassakis encourages us to step forward and take a performative and procreative role in expanding our perception. As we are home to billions of microscopic entities, we continuously cast this part of ourselves into our surroundings, impacting and interacting with everything around us. We leave a microbial trace, a lingering residue of cells on the objects, rooms, and people that we encounter. Breast milk and formula are part of such an exchange process. If we look at the logic of microbial exchange in nursing as ‘giving’ and knowledge about symbionts for a future holo-economy based on co-operation and mutualism for collective survival.

Notes

1 The authors of this article developed the described scenery together with the sound composer Dana Papachristou. Their performance STILLLEBEN took place at the performative symposium and exhibition ‘Applied Microperformativity: Live arts for a radical socio-economic turn’ at the Angewandte Innovation Laboratory (AIL) in collaboration with brut, curated by Lucie Strecker, Klaus Spiess and Jens Hauser in Vienna in 2018.

2 Mater, the Latin word for mother, is mingled with the word material; this refers to the materialistic aspects of motherhood, maybe life, matter bringing to life matter.

3 Professor David Berry focuses on the function of the gut microbiota in health and disease and employs an ecological and evolutionary perspective as well as an organismal view by studying the physiology of key gut microbiota members.

4 The two bonds were designed by Nik Thoenen, who also designed Milk. Gabe, Lust und Verlust, a publication by Irini Athanassakis that received the Austrian State Prize for the most beautiful book of the year, in 2018. https://iriniathanassakis.eu