Volumen Fermentación (Inglés)
Volumen Fermentación (Inglés)
This recipe book is an invitation to put your hands into stories of becoming with bacteria. Fermentation invites us to explore our relationship to the situated microcosmos of life, history and food, as well as to the macrocosmos of time, space, and flow. When we ferment we pick yeast from the air, we use water brought to us by metal pipes, and we mix ingredients imported from places distant from us. We cook and consume the flow of bacteria and food through intersecting territorial and historical layers. In fact we, humans, are precisely a matter of bacteria flowing through time and space.
Even though some biologists refer to the cooperative groups of bacteria as microbial colonies, we would rather call them microbial cultures. Microbial cultures animate matter through fermented performances with humans and non-humans.
To ferment is to perform culture through the unearthing of metaphors, and to unleash alternative and symbiotic histories of what is, what might yet be, and what might have been. Processed foods, polluted city air, and chlorinated tap water create the basis for the transformative techno-alchemy of the fermentation rituals in this book.
This recipe book is, therefore, also an invitation to perform rituals of communion with those near and far. Through fermenting
we learn that matter and metaphors can still be changed. Fermentation can teach us new rituals to sustain and care for all forms of life within this biosphere we share with water, bacteria, plants, animals, fungi, and with each other. This recipe book is also a sort of vaccine for disenchantment, both material and spiritual. As opposed to vaccines cultivated from bacterial fermentation in privatized laboratories, this recipe book is an invitation to cohabit and intra-act with strangers, human and non-human. We ferment for the joy of shared bubbles and for the love for cooperative living and dying.