Thermofilia: Witnessing the microbial through hot yoga fermentation

Thermophilia is a speculative commitment to create warm conditions with companion microbes in and around us through fermentation. We play with the idea that the microbial companions resonate with its holobiont through the gut-brain axis in the visceral warmth, and artificial warmth of hot yoga rooms that is identical with the temperatures needed to ferment yogurt. Thermophilia, a joint project by artist-researchers Kaajal Modi and Riina Hannula outlines the development of a thermophilic, or warm, practice for microbes and microbial symbionts. Tapping into narratives of wellness that are by definition humanist and individualising, we stay with the trouble of colonial violence, cultural appropriation of heat and instrumentalising of microbial and mammalian companions. Thermophilia opens space for a new meaning of warmth of the fermentations from microbial perspectives.

The first iteration of the work was a public installation at SOLU/Bioart Society in August 2024. A thermophilic space called “hatha yoghurt” invited visitors in a practice of somatic communion with microbes via a multispecies soundscape. We posit somatic practices as performative interactions (Williamson et al. 2014) that speculatively commit to the sensory and speculative as key aspects of material intra- and inter- species practices of oral and embodied feminist care. Care for/by/with nonhuman others that exist as part of our bodies, particularly when they are not visible, can be tricky without falling into moralising and binaristic thinking (Fraser 2023; Giraud 2019; Hey 2019; Hird 2009; de la Bellacasa 2017).

Thermophilia attempts to tune into thermophilic bacteria through embodied resonance to microbial desires, and in so doing, find warmer ways to conduct more-than-human care. It is a practice that seeks to disrupt anthropocentric and binaristic kinships into more complex modes of continuous and symbiotic becoming with, or withnessing (Brives et al. 2021). In our workshop at Carpa9, created heat with participants’ bodies and industrial heaters to ferment yogurts. After the presentation and adding microbial starters to milk products, we guided people to experience 15-minute “hatha yogurt” audio exercises interpreted by invited dancers. The speculative suggestion to move as a holobiont body is a performative experiment, that supports its companion species inoculation in the milk mediums before they are digested and transformed into the multispecies body.

References

Brives, C., M. Rest, & S. Sariola, eds. 2021. With Microbes. Mattering Press.

de la Bellacasa, M. P. 2017. Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Fraser, N. 2023. Cannibal capitalism: How our system is devouring democracy, care, and the planet and what we can do about it. Verso books.

Giraud, E. H. 2019. What comes after entanglement?: Activism, anthropocentrism, and an ethics of exclusion. Duke University Press.

Hey, M. 2019. “Fermenting communications: fermentation praxis as interspecies communication.” Public 30(59): 149–157.

Hird, M. 2009. The origins of sociable life: Evolution after science studies. Springer.

Williamson, J.R., L.K. Hansen, G. Jacucci, et al. 2014. “Understanding performative interactions in public settings.” Pers Ubiquit Comput 18: 1545–1549. doi.org/10.1007/s00779-014-0819-7.