Location: Glasgow Green / Richmond Park

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀

𝗖𝗼𝗻𝗲𝗳𝗳𝗹𝘂𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 is a hybrid work and research group consisting of Katy Lewis Hood and Jac Common, which attends to queer, anticolonial, and nonhuman lifeways in wet-land ecologies and infrastructures through poetry, essays, and image-making. Their project asks how we might dissolve the planetary geometries of capitalism’s force with bathymetric micro-logics and bacterial molecularity.

Taking the form of a microbiological sampling laboratory — a carrier apparatus and orbital lab shaker — their work brings the River Clyde into the exhibition space with living and incubating water samples. Coneffluents invites you, the audience, to activate their sculptural installation through two workshops that bring together poetry and DIY microbiology as ways of sensing the Clyde and its microbial inhabitants. 

In this workshop, we’ll explore ways of sampling bacterial life in the River Clyde, practising and playing with DIY microbiology methods alongside poetry prompts. We’ll use field lab equipment to take water samples from the river, and follow some scientific recipes to grow the bacteria that call the water and soil home. As we walk, talk, and sample, we’ll attend to place and ecological relationships on multiple scales, while considering bodily experiences and processes of contamination often left out of the kinds of scientific methods we’re using. What languages and practices might we need to reach for or dream up in relating to rivers beyond extractive and anthropocentric ways of thinking? If you want to show the council your water is polluted, what could a poem do to help? The bacterial ‘cultures’ we collect will then be housed in the exhibition space, where they’ll incubate and grow before the second workshop.