The project ‘Collective Gestures’ explores fermentation as a vehicle for collaboration, community and interspecies relations. Central to the research are stories of migrants and travelers who, faced with the inevitability of resettling, have travelled with preserved portions of their family’s fermented foods applied to fabric, safely kept in their pockets or luggage. The traveler’s fermented cloths become portals into modes of collaboration and entanglements between humans and non-humans and are a gateway across space and time.
In investigating these stories further, alongside experimenting with textiles and fermented foods, Inês Neto dos Santos seeks to challenge the long-standing, capital-centric notion of nature as a backdrop to culture, proposing an understanding of the two as one.
‘Collective Gestures’ revolves around questions about the meaning of belonging, of making home and the significance of carrying one’s culture (social, artistic, bacterial) across borders.
Through this work, Inês Neto dos Santos investigates fermentation as a creative practice, one which does not fit capitalist modes of being - rather, it creates a world in which we live as collaborators, rather than competitors or products. ‘Collective Gestures’ will unfold in a purposefully slow manner, following the rhythms of microbes, plants and other non-humans.
(Image: Inês Neto dos Santos, ‘Sourdough Jacket’, exhibition view at Whitechapel Gallery London Open 2022, photo by Sam Nightingale)
