Welcome back!  For the past few years, we’ve been exploring other knowledges and asked if it is possible to reclaim these ways of knowing?  Yet, in searching for what was radically “other,” we were confronted by the complex politics of knowledge decolonization.  It seems we should be inquiring into what we already know and how we know it. 

Beginning this Fall 2024, our third artistic research program, Lightless Fires (2024–26) seeks fermentation as a figure and technique of collective memory, autonomous archiving, and writing histories.  We begin these next two years with Sour Things by Mirna Bamieh and friends, to think and feel with fermentation nearby, and ask:  

What happens to our memories and their material residue when they are stored away in bodies and vessels that cannot breathe and cannot see the light of day?  What other ways of archiving can we cultivate when considering absence or exclusion as the production of another presence or emergence, and when conceiving death as a passage, not an end? What might we learn about the nature of history and time when we think of fermentation as a metaphor and when we experience it as a corporeal process?