Cellumonials
2019–ongoing
Baum & Leahy

Performances:

Healing Weekend, part of Welcome Home, Elephant West

Social Service Club curated by ArtRebels, The Farm

24 Hours in Uchronia with Helga Schimd, part of 24/7: A wake up call from our non stop world, Somerset House

More than half of the cells in your body are microbial. To these trillions of bacteria, archaea, fungi and protozoa your body is their home. How is time and space experienced from the depths of your gut? Comparative to our own, bacterial lifespans are short – ranging from minutes to a few hours. Yet these organisms live longer outside of the individual framework of lifetimes as we know them, as singular cells grow into multitudes by dividing into new bodies.

In a series of Cellumonials (cellular ceremonies) Baum & Leahy invite you to connect with your cohabiting microbes and understand your body as an ecosystem of constant lifecycles. Collective sensory reorientation masks allow you to pause visual stimuli, have a gut time and delve deep into the microbial cycles of your body, to connect with the invisible microscopic landscapes living within and around you.

Slowly, evaporating, you’re becoming lighter


Until all that’s left is your microbes


You’re still visible as a ghostly outline


Formed by these organisms


Inhale, feel how you are shimmering with microbes


Exhale, a living aura


Sense how you are hosting a multitude


and how you are being hosted and supported in return