Over six months, the participating artists practiced Butoh together to build a collective repertoire of butoh-inspired movements to choreograph a live performance, generate audio and visual records, and develop an AI-driven video installation as the basis for Mitochondrial Ontologies.
The workshops were led by choreographer Salome Nieto and organized by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. In preparation for the workshops, each artist was provided with a digital microscopic camera, a set of pert-dishes, and instructions on cultivating and caring for bacteria. Each participating artist was asked to record audio reflections, images of growing bacteria and poetry during the project’s duration. The participants also read texts together, including selections from essays by Sondra Farleigh on the alchemy of Butho, reflections on Indigenous, hybrid and borderland identities by Gloría Anzaldua and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gilles Deleuze’s essays on the fold, Lynn Margulis’s theories of symbiosis, and Johana Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory.
Butoh’s focus on improvisation and inviting embodied communal and individual reflections on the nature of being through visual prompts facilitated connections among participants and reflections on our human and non-human ancestries. The participants shared their experiences of growing bacteria through audio, photography, poetry, and video. The workshops became gatherings and rich environments, hosts of energies, effects, ideas and resources that have inspired symbiotic interactions between the participants and collaborators generating parallel projects and cross-pollinations.
The participating artists included: Matilda Aslizadeh, Maira Cristina Castro, Lois Klassen, Alessandra Santos, Sarah Shamash, prOphecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Salome Nieto and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda.
In addition, the Brazilian bio-artist and researcher Felipe Shibuya was invited to give a talk and workshop on safety and best practices for artists working with bacteria.
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Click below to explore the workshops.
