Redo of territory

My Territory—

—Is the production of weird beverages and strange fermentations. It’s a little more oriented toward traditional culinary practice than it is laboratory practice at the moment; an aspect of this project I would like to change. What I have going so far includes three different types of foot cider, various wild fermentations, a hand-crushed moldy apple cider, a kombucha, a mouth ferment, a failed mouth ferment, and a candy ferment that refuses to do anything. I also have a couple sumac ciders, one being fermented in darkness, the other in daylight. I also have a bread and cheese-making practice. At this point, I’m a caretaker of several species of microorganisms. My territory is also time and location-based. Temporal in the sense that I regularly have to tend to the cultures and schedule around rising breads, acidifying beverages, and rotting fruit, but also time-based according to what I can collect to ferment from the local environment. I’m feeling not only a shortage of daylight, but the unavailability of supplies. What I can gather or even grow is based on where I am—most of these cultures are wild or arrived by collaboration and gift-giving. This is also, hopefully, a territory of horizontal exchange not only between microorganisms and their genetic material but also between humans and between kingdoms and biological domains. Horizontal exchanges that are based on a different value system than capitalist economics.

My Problem—

—Is how do I go from a servant/caretaker to a more collaborative and coevolutionary partner. Coevolutionary in the sense that these microorganisms need to start doing new things and in order for that to happen, so do I. I think it’s been remarkable to see that these living things have transformative agency and capabilities. But to remain here and gawk and demonstrate this isn’t quite enough anymore. After all, cheese-making, wine-making, bread-making are nothing new. How can other practices for us, the makers and them, the other makers, be put into place. I started doing this by mixing mediums—putting kombucha culture into milk so it makes cheese instead of vinegar. What else and how far can this go? At the same time, another crucial part of this project is the fact that its rooting our bodies in the world by using parts of us as transformative agents… it’s expanding our thinking and definition of body. Body parts are vessels that hold enormous potential agency for alchemical practices beyond what we could skillfully learn or assume to know.