Scentsory Foraging: the eros of olfaction in multi-species metabolisms

A public lecture by bioartist Tarsh Bates, Umeå University

This seminar presents an overview of my artistic research with the human as a queer ecology, taking seriously the agency and response-ability of micro-organisms within ecologies. I voyage into the CandidaHomo ecology, discuss the reproductive labour politics involved in microbial fermentation practices, and introduce a new project which ventures into the tactility and in/tangibility of olfaction in multi-species orientations. Odorants are fundamental within metabolic processes, ingested, digested, excreted through the living, the non-living and the semi-living. This project positions olfaction as a transcorporeal, queer micro-performative eros that makes all of us on Terra sense-able to and of each other.

Artist Bio: 

I was born in Mununjali/Beaudesert, Yugambeh/Queensland, grew up in Matamata, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and have lived for the last 35 years in Perth, Whadjuk Nyungar Boodja/South-Western Australia. I recently moved to Ubmeje, Sápmi, the lands of the Sami people in northern Sweden. I have worked as a pizza delivery driver, a fruit and vegetable stacker, a toilet-paper packer, a compost researcher, a honeybee ejaculator, a gallery invigilator, a raspberry picker, an academic, an editor, a bookkeeper, a car detailer, and a life drawing model. I have a PhD in Biological Art from SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia and am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Design & Molecular Biology at Umeå University, Sweden exploring olfaction as microperformativity and interspecies orientations. I am enamoured with Candida albicans.