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Lessons from the yeast

Kamilė Krasauskaitė
Slavs and Tatars’ Pickle Bar, Berlin (December 2021)

Photo: Breadmasks by Kamilė Krasauskaitė

The one-day program “Lessons from the yeast” was focused on human capacity to understand others and learn from them. For every species “living” means “collaboration” and whether aware of it or not, collaboration is the foundation of our mundane lives. On daily basis we need help and assistance from others, human or non-human. We make a truce with our alarm clock every morning, cross paths with dozens of strangers, use comb, pen, spoon to make our life easier, share our body and habitat with numerous microorganisms that count on our hospitality, while also relying on other living species to help us survive. Annie Lennox was right when saying that “some of them want to use you, some of them want to get used by you” but however we put it the only certain thing is that as living beings we are not really that independent. We live only through contamination, exchange, and entanglement and are much rather interdependent. Microbial bodies articulate the politics of cohabitation and interdependency better than we do, so could it be possible to re-evaluate our relationships, structures, and networks by looking up to them?
With Lecture-performance “Labour of Love” and her research based presentation and using sourdough and the processes of fermentation as a change catalyst, Kamilė Krasauskaitė opened up the question of building new structures and connections with others and presented how cohabiting and collaboration between two strangers looks like in a microbial universe. Do opposites really attract? Are they capable of building strange, unique, and solid structures together?
On the other hand “Lessons from the (y)east” zine by Kamilė Krasauskaitė and Teodora Jeremić was an attempt to share a collaborative experience and piece of mind on collaborating, cohabiting, coliving, coworking, constructing, connection, communication.