Microbial Futures Lab: Future Medicine - art workshop to catalyse a shift in values and environmental relations

Microbial Futures Lab: Future Medicine workshop facilitated by Eva Bubla, Hungarian community artist and activist 

Microbial Futures Lab is a traveling laboratory, a constantly expanding collection of future medicines, treatments, rites and narratives reflecting on the well-being of human and more-than-human lifeforms. The human body consists of human cells which are tenfold outnumbered by a vast number of microbial organisms (such as bacteria, fungi or protozoa) (Margulis and Sagan, 2002). Instead of thinking of microbes as disease-causing, what if we take seriously the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? Thinking of the human body in this way challenges simplistic notions of the human as a unitary (mostly social) subject characterized by boundedness and finitude. All bodies are interconnected microbial ecosystems, living and breathing habitats of tiny organisms: bodies of cities, bodies of waters, air, soil, and our own human bodies are inseparable. 

How can we imagine the medicines of the future in a world where our and our children’s present relationship with the environment is typically defined by rituals of disinfection, fighting bacteria and viruses? What speculative visions of the future, of humanmicrobes or microbialhumans, old-new rites, treatments and medicines can we imagine if we look at the concept of health in a holistic way, if we understand it as the mutual well-being of symbiotically living human and more-than-human lifeforms?

During the workshop, you will get introduced to some key elements of the Lab’s collection, as well as the stories related to them. You will travel through time and space, encapsulated landscapes and extraterrestrial drops, and will investigate the present and future of your own environment to come up with new rites and medicines for a healthy ecosystem of human and more-than-human lifeforms.

The project is rooted in the collaboration with the researchers of the Microbial Childhood Collaboratory (MCC) at Tampere University, Finland.

Eva Bubla 's work has been centered around current ecological and social concerns. At the boundaries of art and science, her projects aim to map, perceive, interpret, and as such (re)connect audiences to the local ecosystem. She is keen on working together with local communities and other sectors; these forms of interactions define if an object, an installation, a performance, a workshop, or a festival is born. Her solo and collaborative projects have addressed issues such as the role of urban green areas, the challenges of farming, air, water or plastic pollution, the ecological needs and risks of freshwaters, and relevant human activities by offering relevant social discourse, new perspectives or future imaginations.