Marie-Eve Levasseur’s work proposes brewing symbiotic care in a brewery where plants, microorganisms (yeast), machines, and humans collaborate. The work recognizes brewsters, alewives, and other women who brew for their kin to survive, but also gather specific knowledge about plants, fungi, healing, and caring for their own bodies and those related to them. The work also examines the relationship of human beings to yeast, researching former and current rituals and looking at the power relations related to brewing and caring.
Marie-Eve Levasseur’s work deals with intimacy, interactions, and non-human ecosystems. She works with video, installation, sculpture, and 3D animation, among other techniques. The method she uses feeds from feminist science fiction and its emancipatory potential. Her projects produce speculative fabulations; imagined situations with fictive devices, extensions for human and non-human beings that open a cross-species dialogue.
The hymn to Ninkasi, one of the ancient beer goddesses, will still be sung in the future. There, she will appear as a fungi cyborg goddess and will stand for one of the first and most important symbiotic collaborations between human beings, fungi, and technologies; one that is necessary for the survival of all that lives and casts a light on how deep our mutual dependence is. The proposal consists in a 3D world, a futurist brewery where plants, microorganisms (yeast), machines, and human beings are working in symbiosis.
Marie-Eve Levasseur / Leipzig, Germany — Nov 16, 2020
Interview on the work http://marieevelevasseur.com
The products of the mysterious, almost magical process of fermentation have accompanied people’s rituals since the beginning. Although humans did not name the single-celled fungus microorganism by its scientific name saccharomyces cerevisiae (a.k.a. brewer’s yeast), they understood the making of an entity, and they called her Ninkasi, Mbaba-Mwanna-Waresa, or Tenetet (Sumerian, Zulu, and Egyptian beer goddesses). Through an imaginary space that would take the form of short videos with text and images as a collage on a dedicated webpage, I want to make visible the unrecognized work of the brewsters, alewives, and other women who brew for their kin to survive. They also gathered specific knowledge about plants and fungi, healing and caring for their own bodies and those related to them. I also want to examine the relationship of human beings with yeast, researching former and current rituals and looking at the power relations related to brewing and caring.
The Akademie Schloss Solitude is an international and transdisciplinary artists' residence.
In 2016, Akademie Schloss Solitude launched the Web Residencies to encourage young talents of the international digital scene and artists from all disciplines dealing with web-based practices. ZKM has been program partner from 2017–2019. For each call, the curator selects four project proposals whose creators receive a four-week residency and 750 Euro.
Artists are invited to experiment with digital technologies and new art forms, and reflect on the topics set by the curators. Web residencies are carried out exclusively online, and the works are presented online.
Artists and students of all disciplines as well as former or current Solitude fellows may apply. There is no age limit.
www.akademie-solitude.de Webresidencies
