“Sehnsüchte, Prozessstufe II” by Linda Weiß Part of the exhibition “etwa faustgroß” Villa Merkel, November 11–27, 2022
Weiß’s work asks if it is possible to think productively, to create with sugar cycles of ecological systems that are yet still dependent on the massive global sugar industry and all of its attendant historical baggage. The show is in part about the aesthetic, ecological, social, and political possibilities of largely DIY processes like fermentation, for example. Here used as one that converts sugar into cellular energy, it operates as both metaphor and material biological process, in what Lauren Fournier describes in Fermenting Feminism as a “symbiosis between species and coevolution, accessibility and bioavailability, conservation and transformation, future and survival… and finally to the reduction of damage and care.” According to Fournier, fermentation can be understood as a feminist or queer practice; fermenting methods in life and in art draw attention to ecological relations as well as ways of caring for other kin, to the vast variation of the temporalities of life, and to humanity’s bacterial ancestors.
Weiß’s work stages a digestive aesthetics that pushes us to think about the possibly queer politics of digestion (as Ramzi Fawaz explores elsewhere) through the specific ways in which sugar moves and transforms in different systems and for different functions. Drawing on contemporary theoretical works on feminist theory, plants and weird fungal life, and speculative fictions, Weiß’s focus on certain biological conversions of sugar not only points toward possible clean energy alternatives (we’re not there yet, the work acknowledges this with its dependence on a small lithium battery for power) but also requires that visitors acknowledge their own co-dependencies and how those substances are produced and circulated.
Sehnsüchte: in English, longings, but it’s a word known for its impossibility to translate exactly. With etymological origins in the words for yearning (das Sehnen) and addiction (die Sucht) the title of Weiß’s show asks us to dwell in the sticky space between both. Sugar seduces, yes, but is nonhuman nourishment here as well, a substance that crosses the species divide or blurs it, a link between complex biological organisms in symbiotic relation. Text by Alison Sperling Alison Sperling is an IPODI Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technische Universität Berlin where she works on queer and feminist theory, science fiction, and the Anthropocene.
