DomesticScience
Endosymbiotic Love Calendar
Endosymbiotic Love Calendar is an art & science collaboration between performance artists1 + microbiologists2 working together to embody a microorganism3 for every month of 2021.
We use a familiar domestic object; the home or office wall calendar, as a playful publication to represent unique explorations of the microbial world
The diverse team of 16 human animals explore themes of symbiotic and commensal relations, expanding our understanding of the diversity of gender, reproduction, sexual orientation and social behaviour in both microorganisms and humans.
We explore identity and social justice through reimagining the human from the perspective of microbes. Our collaboration is founded on a desire to form new alliances between art & science to reveal the intimate relationships between the human and non-human and the inhumane.
We want to explore human relationships and practices with the microbial world now and for the future in an accessible way. Our goal is to foster accessible knowledge exchange between the academic community of microbiology and performance art.
The core of the project is a collaborative process creating human scale representations of microorganisms together and documenting them in a calendar - a domestic everyday object - as a familiar space to reflect on for some, unfamiliar worlds.
[1] Annalaura Alifuoco, RJ Lloyd, Conway McDermott, Tammy Reynolds
[2] Natalie Beveridge, Neil Dawson, Rod Dillon, Viv Dillon, Lee Haines, Yasmine Kumordzi, Emmanuel Laplantine, Ewan Russell, Dee Walshe
[3] Bacteriophage, Cordyceps, Cowpox, Giardia, Leishmania*, Mycorrhizal fungi, Neurons, Shigella pathogen, Strombidium purpureum, Tulip breaking virus, Wolbachia, Yeasts
*Leishmania photo by Paulo Henrique Orlandi Mourao – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0
Funded by
Microbiology in Society Award 2020