Workshop 'Sourdough DNA' with Kamilė Krasauskaitė

November 20, 2020
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Institutio media invites to participate in a series of workshops “Sourdough DNA” with artist Kamilė Krasauskaitė. They will be held between 29 November – 18 December 2020, organised in a series of online and offline individual meetings.

Participants of the workshop Sourdough DNA will be invited to create their unique collection of lactobacillus and wild yeast collection by kneading, travelling to various locations, performing other actions. The workshop will aim to find metaphorical or realistic methods for sending a love message, caring and finding universal rituals to connect us with others.

One of the main goals of the project is to sequence the DNA of particular sourdough, to send it to the other geographical area and then to sequence it again. This will demonstrate how the same material gets enriched in different environment, which characterises the microbial biodiversity of the sourdough.

Statistical approach will be used to compare different communities and locations the sourdough has traveled to. Participants may find that their starters came from their own collection of bacteria found on their own bodies. Starters might be influenced by many factors such as climate, various grains, water.

Participants will be provided with tools (dry sourdough leaves, a jar, bread banneton proofing basket, a stainless steel scraper, linen cloth) and guided how to activate them to catch more wild bacteria. Then some observations about the aroma and the raising speed of the dough will be made and recorded. Participants will have a chance to create a record of what they felt, learned, found during the process of kneading dough and baking bread, in a selected format, such as stories, playlists played for the rising dough and other.

Kamilė Krasauskaitė is an artist working with sourdough. Her practice evolves in different formats – installations, sculptures, publications or social events. Artists and sourdough obey the same principles of fermentation: the process does not provide a finished artefact, the installation is limited to the present moment, the events arise from each other and are constantly becoming and disappearing, and are therefore performative. One of the main missions in Krasauskaitė’s activities is to bring together and to get different communities involved in her actions. Krasauskaitė also currently works as a curator of education and community engagement at the CAC, Vilnius.

The workshop will be organised as two Zoom sessions, a video “learning how to touch”, a pdf with guidelines and a set of instructions for various experiments with the sourdough. The data generated together will be used to compare how geography and different flours affect microbial growth over time. The final result of the workshop will be exhibited at Alt lab, a non disciplinary laboratory in Vilnius.

Please send a short motivation to krakamile@gmail.com by 26 November to register for the workshop.

The project is supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality.

Organized by Institutio Media, in partnership with Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association.

An enourmous thanks to researcher and scientist Edvardas Golovinas, for translating hypothetical ideas into scientific terms and examples, guiding us through the process and pointing out the most important steps we wouldn’t be able to formulate by ourselves; and finally, for creating a logical basis for our upcoming ideas.

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