Rethink Bacteria (2022-2025)
Microbes are the most important, diverse and ancient life forms on our planet. The science of these organisms, microbiology, is the science of the most significant living entities and their influence on all the rest of life. If the world we inhabit is indeed a microbial world, then many of the standard philosophical ways in which we conceive biological phenomena and how they are investigated will have to be rethought.
Maureen O'Malley
Philosophy of Microbiology
2024-2025 One-year art residency at the Humboldt University in Berlin, by Dr. Marc Erhardt, Professor for Molecular Microbiology, Institute of Biology.
Music composed for the Rethink Bacteria exhibition - Bandcamp
by Andrés Jankowski - 1605munro
Interview by Antibiotic Smart Sweden (Ulrika Haglund)
Interview by Linda Rosendahl Nordin - Pure Effect Sweden
Rethink Bacteria (2022-2025)
How can art contribute to the perception of nature in its complexity? How can it promote sensitivity and empathy for other forms of life as well as awareness for a harmonious balance between human existence and the natural world?
Art can bring the public on a journey and transform their perspective through their works, installations, and performances. Art as a means to inspire and act. Art contributes to a positive and guilt-free approach rooted in expert knowledge and in the artist’s sensitive and alternative vision. Art not only enriches our lives, but sometimes even radically changes them. Through the combination of awakening and wonder, my goal with my projects is to foster debate and nourish our future through art.
The pandemic has illustrated how vulnerable and, above all, globally interconnected our lives are, not only in the economic and political sense, but also in the biological sense: humans are part of a system of microbes, non human animals, vegetation and weather, of computers and supply chains, of data and money flows, part of a system that points far beyond humans.
The concept of the world, which is based on the human point of view, must be replaced by that of the planet, the totality of what exists as living or also non-living on this earth, is interconnected, vulnerable as a system, capable of survival only as a system.
The previous 250 years have placed human progress at the center of all things, leading to both great discoveries and advances, but also a number of fundamental crises we are now confronted with. However, over the last generation we have faced a paradigm change.
With science and their own creativity on their side, artists have the power to confront, move, convene, and speak to each and every one of us, young and old. Art alone won’t save us, but it can enlighten our present and imagine the future.