All the landscapes you are
Victoria Douka-Doukopoulou
Artsciene Interfaculty , The Hague, Netherlands
Much like a GPS that has lost satellite connection and cannot find all the desired streets on a terrain, the human eye lacks the capability of seeing everything that surround us. Microorganisms go by unnoticed, although they make up about 1.5 kilograms of an individual’s weight and our surroundings.
During the workshop participants will have the opportunity to grow and visualise a map of the bacterial landscape they carry and the bacterial landscape they are, examining if it is possible to differentiate. By growing the microorganisms that exist in their shoes, hands or mouths, the participants will be encouraged to reconsider the sometimes vague and abstract terms that exist in the peripheries of our vocabularies like microbes, pathogens, or mould and their precise meaning. The workshop will guide participants through the processes of bio-hacking and DIY culture to explore methodologies and strategies in dealing with complex issues that one might be unable to see .
In the ever changing ecological landscapes, where separation is easier traceable than fusion, its residents stand on maps tracing the separation of urban, natural, cyber and legal borders while missing the fact, that they, themselves are a map of fusion of their surroundings.
DESCRIPTION:
all the landscapes you are is a workshop that explores the possibilities of visualising complex issues what we are familiar with but not precisely comprehending.
The workshop takes microorganisms as a departing point to discuss greater and more complex biotic processes from biocrusts to climate change to monocultures. It aims at introducing concepts that are repeatedly mentioned like epidemics, pathogens or yeasts and deciphering what they actually mean.
By involving the participants in creating bacterial maps of parts of their bodies, it encourages discussion around borders, the nature of separating, and whether it is possible to trace the liability between separation lines. It moves into raising a discussion about the difference between micro and macro scales and how much “seeing” change influences actually realising you are undergoing change. It hopes to do so, by demonstrating bio-hacking and DIY culture to showcase how it is possible to deal with large complex issue or even hyperobejects in a grassroots manner, while using the DIY framework as a tool and a form of discourse.
The workshop aims to showcase the need for plurality and complexity when discussing “nature” and ecological processes. It does so, by pointing out the demonisation of microorganisms, and how commercial products like dettol® claim to have to easy attainable solution against all, when the general public is not even sure what this “all” includes.
To help with planning please register: https://bunb2017.eventbrite.co.uk
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIE:
victoria douka-doukopoulou lives in the hague (nl) where she studies at the artscience interfaculty of the royal academy of the art, the hague and the royal conservatory and plans to attain a degree in 2017. as a filmmaker, she gathers and assembles the invisible, the unthinkable and the unappreciable and usually turns them into films, sometimes into bio-things. her work grows and moves, literally —