Based on the new materialist concept of vibrant matter, which foregrounds the living, agentic, and energetic qualities of matter, the idea of storied matter emphasises how matter is also story-laden and holds narrative capabilities, transgressing the conventional understanding of narrativity as a human activity. Often invisible to the human eye and difficult to perceive at first glance, matter’s narrative agency is, for us, best understood through eco- and bioart practices, as exemplified by the work of Nergiz Yeşil, Maya Minder, Rice Brewing Sisters Club, and Gülşah Mursaloğlu. In this paper, we discuss kombucha, potato, and algae as nonhuman agents of temporality and life cycles, where the concepts of life and non-life merge with one another. We explore through fermentation and plant-based material,we build a conversation on how these examples of (non-)living matter formulate narratives on posthuman time and temporal cycles. Yeşil’s LOREM İPSUM II. series (2020-ongoing) is based on kombucha mushroom, in which the artist uses the kombucha byproducts as a canvas for her installation. Similarly, Maya Minder’s film KombuMe (2020) shows the scoby-based material used to explore social action and fermentation. Rice Brewing Sister Club’s defines their core practice as social fermentation, where they bring “aunty wisdom” into the sustainable and eco-friendly ways of artistic practice. In their project at Seoul MMCA and SEMA, they explored algae-based plastic production. As an artistic exploration, Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s Merging Fields, Splitting Ends (Sequence II and III) (2021-22) showcases potato starch-based plastic material, which continuously changes, dissolves and degrades. With the help of these works, we argue that bioart provides us with profound ways of thinking-with and becoming-with vibrant and storied matter, whereby the artists intra-act with life and non-life, blurring the boundaries between the two and narrating the myriad stories of biodegradable matter.
Başak Ağın, PhD, is Associate Professor of English literature at TED University, Ankara, Türkiye. She is the founder of PENTACLE, the first Turkish website on environmental and post-humanities (https://thepentacle.org), the author of Posthümanizm: Kavram, Kuram, Bilim-Kurgu [Posthumanism: Concept, Theory, Science-Fiction] (2020), and the Turkish translator of Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, which is currently in its production stage. In 2021, she edited the Turkish translation of Simon C. Estok’s Ecophobia Hypothesis (Routledge, 2018). She also co-edited two volumes, Posthuman Pathogenesis: Contagion in Literature, Arts, and Media (Routledge, 2022) and Beşerî Bilimlerin 50 Rengi: Çevreci, Dijital, Tıbbi ve Posthüman Sesler [50 Shades of Humanities: Environmental, Digital, Medical, and Posthuman Voices] (2023), the only handbook available for the Turkish academia in the relevant fields, the second volume of which is forthcoming in 2024. Her scholarly articles appeared in such journals as Ecozon@, CLCWeb, Neohelicon, Translation Review, Configurations, and EJES.
Tuçe Erel is a Berlin-based independent curator, researcher, and cultural worker. She studied sociology at METU (2005) and art theory and criticism (MA program) at Anatolian University (2009). She did her second MA in Art Arts Policy and Management (with curating pathway) at Birkbeck College (2015).
After working at various institutions in Istanbul as a content editor, event manager, archivist, and gallery assistant, she has been a freelance curator and art writer since 2013. She was an active member of >top e.V. between 2017 and 2021, where she curated and hosted events, exhibitions, and a Posthumanism reading group. She was a team member and co-curator at Art Laboratory Berlin from December 2019 to December 2024, assisting and co-curating their hybrid-art-oriented programme.
Her curatorial interests are ecology, Capitalocene, and posthumanism. Erel uses her sociology education in her curatorial research, and in her research methodology, she prefers to twist and challenge conventional social science methodologies. In recent years, she has explored the concept of hacking as a way to unbox the concepts of bio-politics, Anthropocene, ecological crisis, cultures, non-human agency, artistic speculation and imagination.
Since 2017, Erel implemented a curatorial narrative focusing on Capitalocene and environmental crises. Some of the curatorial projects focusing on ecology are “Now You are Here” (2017, curated with Seval Şener at Arte Sanat, Ankara); “Leviathan: A Capitalocene Beastiarium” (2021, curated with Käthe Wenzel and Lisa Glauer at TOP e.V. Berlin) "Vicious Cycles" (2022, Art Laboratory Berlin), "Echoes of the Future" (2024, at Biosphere Potsdam).
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