“And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation.”
Donna J. Haraway in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

Electricity exists in nature yet is an artificial, invisible matter. From static energy to atomic power it can be harvested and liberated at will. From a light switch to a voltaic cell, a certain force will be impacted upon matter and space. But it comes at a cost. Electricity can also be seen as a story of extractivism and the anthropocentric devastation it can cause is evident.

What does it really mean to colonize the natural? Tame our resources to behave the way we want them to, whenever we need them so and for the purposes we choose? What if this reality was disturbed and there was the need to produce electricity in rather, more mutualistic terms?

If we follow Haraway’s ‘speculative thinking’, this project was born with the intention of creating an aesthetic of interruption based upon the lack of electrical energy produced by means of extraction. Continuity, a given fact of Capitalism paused, questioned and restructured in rather new, collaborative ways where beings in the mud, a collective of microbial fuel cells subvert the power dynamic towards generation, storage and consumption of electric energy. All this effort to create improvisations with sound artists and musicians coming through a a :Klef piano and a Microbit microcontroller.

What you are about to see is the videodocumentation of a work in progress that has not been successful yet nor easy. It is about creating a bridge, a brief moment between chemical and electric energy. It’s about hauling, living in close proximity with microscopic beings that have the potential to become a source of power. It is a game of waiting, of becoming vulnerable towards the fact, we, humans are not in control, that bacteria are. And that, ultimately, is a humbling narrative of wonder.

Special thanks to Dr. Natalie Gosnell, Dr. Teresa Connors, Dr. Eathan Janney, Tim de Voe, McKenzie Gennin, Valerie Harrison and Mrs. Mary Robinson.

Research conducted at the Leonardo/ISAST @Djerassi Resident Artist Program | 2023