MICRO HUMAN

See more details here:
http://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/bigbacteria

BIG BACTERIA (BB) establishes an interdisciplinary research network between the natural and the health sciences, the arts and the humanities, in order to strengthen the latter in the light of rapid biotechnological advances and related worldviews. BB founded in 2014 by Slavko Kacunko and Sabine Kacunko.One of the long-term goals of the project, which starts with a public art performance INVINCIBLE and is planned to be continued through a subsequent cooperation of the artist with scientists and institutions from Rome Italy, Berlin Germany as well as Copenhagen Denmark; is to increase the public outreach of knowledge and sensitivity of societies to the transformations which affect public health, natural and cultural heritage. To achieve these goals, Big Bacteria will examine the role of bacteria as omnipresent tools for rethinking relations between the natural and the health sciences, the humanities and the arts.

As their taxonomy unambiguously suggests, bacteria are the facts of the permanently changing and sensing living matter. Microbial ‘dust’ and ‘patina’ represent an important case of bacteria´s agency to be systematized and related to the research on biodeterioriation (breakdown of materials by microbial action) and bioremediation.

Together with an international team of researchers from different disciplines, bacteria´s role as archeological-ecological nexus for an integrative health & heritage research will be experimentally explored, both on site and in the laboratory. The future framework of the project aims to profit from Kacunko´s and collaborators´ track record of conceptualization and visualization of the building of natural biofilm or patina in the natural- and cultural heritage context to conduct an exemplary case using the largest urban plant microcosm of the world and their unique archaeological sites with the longest records of plant- and natural biofilm growth and development – Coliseum in Rome. The natural patina formed on an object is an ideal breeding ground and medium for the forward evolving plant species not least qua biofilm.

This collaboration intends to pursue contacts with the researchers on site, established through the previous art-as-research collaboration by Sabine Kacunko (Micro Human, Berlin) and to analyze both chosen actual and archived examples of natural biofilm and the health plants in Coliseum (Prof. G. Caneva & G. Antonini, University of Rome), Biofilm Test Facility and Department for Arts and Cultural Studies (Prof. Thomas Bjarnsholt, Prof. Slavko Kacunko, University of Copenhagen) and other partners.