Responses, registers & refelections of ongoing collaborations, cross-pollinations and parallel projects & works in progress
Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time & the Digital
Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital is an ongoing collaborative project which uses the concept of the mitochondria as a metaphor to explore the female body as a generative host of human and non-human life. Drawing from Lynn Margulis’ (1986) endosymbiotic theory of evolution, which emphasizes cooperation rather than competition, the project centers on symbiosis as a method of co-creation. The workshops aimed to build a collective repertoire of butoh-inspired movements to choreograph a live performance to generate audio and visual records to develop an AI-driven video installation as the basis for Mitochondrial Ontologies.
Worshops & Gatherings
Over six months, nine artists met, practiced butoh and shared their experiences growing bacteria from their bodies and other domestic spaces. The workshops aimed to build a collective repertoire of butoh-inspired movements to choreograph a live performance to generate audio and visual records to develop an AI-driven video installation as the basis for Mitochondrial Ontologies. The workshops turned into gatherings and became rich environments, hosts of energies, affects, ideas and resources that have inspired symbiotic interactions between the participants and other collaborators.
In preparation for the workshops, each artist was provided with a digital microscopic camera, a set of pert-dishes and instructions on how to cultivate and care for bacteria. Each artist was asked to record audio reflections, images of growing bacteria and poetry during the duration of the project. All these resources were shared with all participants and were used to create additional projects and foster collaborations outside the main nine groups of artists. In the tabs below you will find descriptions, responses and registers of each of the workshops.
The butoh-movement workshops were directed by Salome Nieto and organized by 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. Matilda Aslizadeh, Maira Cristina Castro, Lois Klassen, Alessandra Santos, Sarah Shamash, prOphecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Salome Nieto and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda participated in the workshops.
Mitochondrial Ontologies: A Walk With our Ancestors
Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital, Workshop 1 Part 1
Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital, Workshop 1 Part 2
Participants: Alessandra Santos, Maira Cristina Castro Mina, Sarah Shamash, Matilda Aslizadeh, prOphecy sun, Lois Klassen, Salome Nieto and Gabriela Aceves.
The main purpose of this workshop was to introduce all participants to key Butoh movements and principles. Salome Nieto introduced participants to the Butoh Walk, the Butoh Body and led several exercises to connect us with our past and future lineages. Participants were also provided with a kit that contained five petri-dishes, a microscopic camera, instructions on how to grow bacteria culture and some brief information on mitochondria. All participants were invited to grow bacteria in the coming days and to share the progress images via e-mail or upload them to our digital shared folder..
Shadbolt Center for the Arts, August 14, 2022
Dancing With the Serpent
Participants: Alessandra Santos, Maira Cristina Castro Mina, Sarah Shamash, Matilda Aslizadeh, prOphecy sun, Lois Klassen, Salome Nieto, Freya Zinovieff and Gabriela Aceves.
In this workshop Salome Nieto led Butoh-inspired exercises to connect us with our animal selves through images of the Serpent, the Elephant and the Reptile. Participants continued to explore the Butoh walk and began to put together the repertoire of movements developed into a choreography inspired by Salome’s research on the image of the Serpent.
Participants also began to share images of the bacteria that they cultured so far.
September 25, 2022, Shadbolt Center for the Arts
The Walk and the Empty Gaze
Participants: Alessandra Santos, Maira Cristina Castro Mina, Sarah Shamash, Matilda Aslizadeh, prOphecy sun, Salome Nieto, Freya Zinovieff and Gabriela Aceves.
In this workshop, we were introduced to the Butoh Gaze and continued to practice the Butho Walk and the Butoh Body. We also began shooting the repertoire of movements to be included in the main video and participants continued to share images of the bacteria they’ve grown.
Shadbolt Center for the Arts, October 23, 2022
Together Again
Participants: Alessandra Santos, Maira Cristina Castro Mina, Sarah Shamash, Matilda Aslizadeh, Lois Klassen, prOphecy sun, Salome Nieto, Freya Zinovieff and Gabriela Aceves.
During this workshop we review the movements practiced thus far and recorded audio for the main video project. Gabriela shared texts excerpts by Gloria Anzaldua, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Sondra Horton Fraleigh and Gilles Deleuze with participants. Freya and prOphecy recorded participants reading the excerpts out loud to include them as part of the sound score for the main project.
Shadbolt Center for the Arts, February 12, 2022
The Score and the Repertoire
Participants: Sarah Shamash, Matilda Aslizadeh, prOphecy sun, Salome Nieto, Freya Zinovieff, Gabriela Aceves, Reese Muntean and Oscar Letelier
In this workshop, Salome Nieto performed the repertoire of movements developed so far to establish a score for everyone else. As background for the performance Gabriela Aceves edited a video with the bacteria images shared by participants. The video was projected onto the floor of the theatre. The performance was shot in 4K and 360 video. prOphecy sun, Freya Zinovieff and Oscar Letelier recorded the sound and Reese Muntean shot the video.
Shadbolt Center for the Arts, April 16, 2023
Collaborating with Bacteria: Artist Talk and Workshop with Felipe Shibuya
Participants: Maira Cristina Castro, Alessandra Santos, prOphecy sun, Freya Zinovieff, Lois Klassen, Jay Tseng, Meta Vaughan, Matilda Aslizadeh, and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda.
As part of the Mitochondrial Ontologies Project, Brazilian artist and researcher, Felipe Shibuya was invited to give a talk and workshop on safety and best practices for artists working with bacteria.
April 28, 2023 – Online Workshop
Cross-pollinations & Parallel Projects
- Composing and Decomposing Inside of Sick Woman Theory by Lois Klassen and Margaret Dragu with Maira Castro reading Johanna Hedva's Sick Women Theory
- Last Menstrual Blood/ Meuasangue by Alessandra Santos
- Snake Women by Salome Nieto
- Cosmos and Flowers by Matilda Aslizadeh
- Cosmos by Gabriela Aceves Sepulveda and Matilda Aslizadeh
- Spoken Word by Maira Castro Mina
- Origin and Return by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
- Emptying the body a reflection by Sarah Shamash
- Dreams by Sarah Shamash
Composing and Decomposing Inside of Sick Woman Theory
Lois Klassen with Margaret Dragu
(An artistic project in symbiosis with Mitochondrial Ontologies)
“How do we muster the faith, courage, and will to keep living and fighting? What does it mean to claim for ourselves a sense of wholeness and visibility when the world insists on us being hidden or disguised?” Audre Lorde (The Cancer Journals, 1980)
“Attached to the bed, I raised my sick woman fist, in solidarity.” Johanna Hedva (“Sick Woman Theory,” 2016, 2022)
“[Butoh cultivates] ‘the body that becomes.’” (Sondra Fraleigh quoting Hijikata Tatsumi, 2010)
Since last summer, and fall, I partially attended and attempted to participate in the generative workshops that Gabriela Aceves-Sepulveda hosted in the Mitochondrial Ontologies project. It was “partial” and “attempted” because for most of the workshops I was recovering from a serious illness. My capacity was limited. I attended about an hour of the full-day workshops and then went home exhausted and flooded with fatigue. For the creative work outside of the workshops, I made a limp attempt to feed the projects’ shared files and folders with photos and texts about the lone petri dish of bacteria and fungi that I managed to cultivate with some help from my partner. I was like Johanna Hedva during Black Lives Matter, inside a sick house with a limp fist raised in solidarity, wondering if I was a contributor to anything other than a sick woman’s existence. Eventually I learned that my contributions to the project could be made on my own terms, using the themes and methods as they took on growing relevance and resonance for me.
Since being diagnosed with cancer, all of my artmaking has been collaborative. This strategy has been born out of the necessity to take on substantial projects despite limited energy, and out of joy–now more than ever–in the company of cherished colleagues making creative work desirable and possible. In this parallel project to Mitochondrial Ontologies I am immensely grateful to be working with colleague and elder advisor in sick woman care, Margaret Dragu. Together we expect to produce a new work based on specific domestic ontologies that circulate as wisdom through the bodies of elders, menopaused women, bed-ridden, chair-enabled, house-bound, immunocompromised, fatigue-flooded, virus and cancer stricken, orthopaedically fractured and repaired… We are reflecting on wisdoms held by bodies-that-become through their situated and ever-changing interdependencies and mobilities.
These are far from new inquiries for us. For Margaret Dragu, the question of preparation for dependency and home-based care informed her performance-based and collective media works, Commodification of Touch, How to be Old, and, the related but earlier work, Intergenerational Teachings. These works display ways of knowing that are rarely presented as creative or experimental. In Commodification of Touch five artists including myself learned how to bathe a senior artist.
The videos were part of the 2016 exhibition, “All membranes are porous” (Kamloops Art Gallery; Charo Neville, curator) where they were playing on handheld devices and screens in domestic spaces (bathroom, kitchen nook and family rumpus room) that Margaret had created.
I contributed to her exhibition’s rooms with textile furnishings by Slofemists, my collective sewing project that I was hosting with Lori Weidenhammer, and sharing with many contributors.
As the COVID pandemic dragged on Dragu created a set of short videos called SOCIAL ARCHITECTURE: landscapes 1 – 7 (2021) presenting views from inside a senior’s apartment as architecturally-enabled artworks.
A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A mighty myth in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, In the Evening (Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A mighty myth in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, In the Evening (Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
A poem cycle that I wrote this year, “A mighty myth in the evenings and seasons,” also situates interdependencies inside of domestic spaces and even painted onto buildings. I performed it in the 2023 Jane’s Walk Vancouver near the mural, In the Evening (Fintan Magee, 2018) in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood.
Nearby on the Mount Pleasant Community Screen, a much older work of mine was recently displayed, Flowers for Joyce (2008). It also considers the constricted but pointed gaze of a community gardener.
In our works about the spaces of illness and community, one could say that the sick woman (a term coined by Johanna Hedva that could be used to refer to the conditions of all bodies which do not conform to the mythical not-sick man-body), is active in their gaze from inside the petri dish looking out.
We are eager to continue the generative work of Mitochondrial Ontologies with various methods and anticipated outcomes. Some of these include composing documentation (including storytelling) of food decomposition, rescue, and repurposing that occupies our everyday experiences and spaces. We will also be recomposing into video and text some of the Butoh gestures which themselves re-materialize life and death cycles, and have for Mitochondrial Ontologies been used as foundational work.
Maira Castro reading Johanna Hedva's Sick Woman Theory
Snake Women by Salome Nieto
At the same time that our Mitochondrial Ontologies workshops & gatherings were being organized, Salome Nieto was developing a body of work as part of her MFA degree requirements at SFU’s School of Contemporary Art. Salome’s MFA research focuses on exploring female archetypes to reconnect with her cultural heritage. Building on her extensive practice as a butoh dancer, Salome deconstructed different female archetypes through a series of performances to bring visibility to ongoing violence against women.
As part of the projects developed simultaneously for Mitochondrial Ontologies, Salome shared the poem “Snake Woman accompanied by images of her performance at SFU Goldcorp Center for the Arts.
Snake Woman
For me, the deconstruction of female archetype of the snake has a fundamental meaning: a symbol of fertility, fecundity, harmony, and connection with the earth. With this ancestral archetype of the snake, I reconnect with my cultural lineage, rejecting the ideas imposed by colonialism, patriarchy and Catholicism associated with women as a source of sin. If we change our consciousness and dress in the snake’s skin, we rediscover ourselves with all the potential that femininity houses. Skin change is healing. We peel our skin to leave the past and renew ourselves. If you tell me I am a snake, then, yes, I am. I carry the sign of the serpent in my blood and on my skin. Like the snake, with this work I wanted to find a way to wriggle my way into a space in which I was on some levels not meant to be, or in which I could not always imagine myself.
Cosmos & Flowers by Matilda Aslizadeh
Matilda Aslizadeh created these two photo compositions based on the bacteria cultures that she collected in her home.
Cosmos by Gabriela Aceves & Matlida Aslizadeh
Cosmos is a short video essay that reflects on the entanglements between humans and non-humans created by Matilda Aslizadeh and Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda as part of Mitochondrial Ontologies: Deep Time and the Digital.
The video combines excerpts from Arthur Bradley’s Originary Technicity (2011) with images and sounds generated by humans and non-humans. The text is taken from the chapter Life of Bradley’s book in which he ponders on the evolution of life and technology as one and the same to theorize the concept of technicity. “In the beginning, it was already a machine” (1) Bradley begins to describe the process by which early organisms initiate a complex process of creating and liberating energy that has generated diverse philosophical and metaphorical approaches to understand the relations between machines and organic life. With this video we ponder on such relations and the deep connections between biological and technological forms of life.
The video consists of an animated selection of images of cultured bacteria from domestic spaces taken from Matilda’s home. The images were shot with a microscopic camera and then edited and enhanced using photo and video editing software. The sound composition was created by using image-to-sound and text-to-speech software to sonify the images and voice the text.
The use of these digital tools makes us reflect and question the ways in which digital tools (algorithms), bacteria and humans understand what we as humans call “images and sound.” What does an image-to-sound software see in order to translate image to sound? What does a text-to-speech software read to voice the text? What emerges from working with these agencies (bacteria, digital and human) in an artwork? Is there a possibility of working outside an anthropocentric framework or is working with these agencies the only way in which new realities can emerge?
Bradley, Arthur. 2011. Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida / Arthur Bradley. Palgrave Macmillan.
In progress
Origin & Return by Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda
This image composition was created in response to one of the first butoh-inspired workshops directed by Salome Nieto. Salome led us through a series of exercises to put us in touch with our inner babies. With this image, I used the aesthetic of the kaleidoscope to explore the concepts of folding and unfolding into one and other as metaphors for the continuum of life.
Emptying the Body - a reflection by Sarah Shamash
I see this short reflection piece as inspired by the workshops we did and connected to the parallel project on “dreams” that I am exploring (which is a work in progress). The idea is to trace bacteria left from the saliva on a pillow case as dream archives. This video connects to the unconscious and somatic realm that Salomé opened for us in her workshop facilitation.
In progress
We aknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts
