Artist Interview: Anna Dumitriu and the Pandemic
Fermenting Futures (2020) Dumitriu, A. May, A. BOKU.
Hi Anna. Thank you for sharing your practice with the Cognitive Sensations readers. Could you please tell us about your working schedule prior to lockdown, and how has it changed?
As a freelance artist I normally travel quite a bit, working in labs on art residencies, overseeing my exhibition installations, attending openings and giving lectures. I was in Vienna the week before the lockdown working on my new project “Fermenting Futures”, a collaboration with Alex May and the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology at BOKU – Universität für Bodenkultur that explores the history and future of yeast with a focus on synthetic biology. It was getting a bit strange there then and the university was starting to close. I was meant to be back in May and June but these trips are all on hold until after the lockdown, and the lecture I was due to give in person at the Angewandte will now be online and open to anyone. Quite a few other exhibitions and events are also postponed or cancelled.
So, this is very different to my normal everyday life, meeting different collaborators, visiting different countries, and working with different technologies across infectious diseases, synthetic biology and robotics in different labs, but now the days are quite similar. I still have lots of projects to work on and I’m doing that from home and if necessary in my studio but every day is mostly about making art and focussed on doing things online. I worry I will easily forget this unusual time because of how memories are stored in the brain, it compresses things that are similar.
That’s a really interesting point. I was discussing with a friend just the other day how video calls lack the sensory detail of real life conversations, so a lot of our evening catch-up with friends are becoming quite blurred. I remember learning about episodic memories, which become stronger and more distinct when rich with sensory detail. When our experiences lack variety and interaction with people, perhaps our memories of this experience will become weakened. What do you think will last in most people memories, as a distinct consequence of these times?
I think it will be different for everybody, and looking back on past periods of intense work which are somewhat similar to this time, I think for me it will be things like the completion of new works. I think I will remember my weekly shopping trips to the supermarket in full PPE, I’m not sure how the experience of food shopping will be affected in the future. And also the endless drudgery of cooking for ourselves, normally I eat out a lot to save time and because I am travelling a lot so this is a striking difference, and not something I personally enjoy.
In your previous work exploring iconic diseases such as the Great Plague of London and tuberculosis, you often reference past superstitions and behaviours amongst society. What parallels can be made with COVID-19, and what can we learn from the past?
There are so many parallels and things that are repeating themselves, especially around human behaviour, blaming, rumour and suggested cures (when there is no cure yet). I read that turmeric root has sold out in India because people believe that helps but I very much doubt it does help. Desperation and fear causes humans to behave in shocking ways and even if we think we have evolved from our ancestors who lived (or died) through the Great Plague of London, we are exactly the same, just with more apps.
This period marks a big change in how we communicate and interact with each other. How do you think your relationship with your audience is changing as you communicate with them online?
The nice thing is that I’m doing quite a few bits of online visiting lecturing/tutorials with universities that maybe can’t afford to fly me over usually but now can afford to have me talk or mentor students remotely. This is great as it provides some much-needed income for me and it’s so fascinating to learn about courses where students are learning about my work. I was part of a student crit for Parsons School in New York earlier this week and have also been teaching for the University of Leiden and Aalto University. I’m doing a workshop for Imperial College later in the month too.
And lots of artists, especially in BioArt are coming together on Zoom, in big groups often. These events are quite interesting, with people sharing the impact of the pandemic and artistically reflecting across international borders. But I have to admit I do feel a bit on show so sometimes I just put up a photo instead of using video, unless I am actually speaking. Also Zoom is quite intimidating as a format, especially as these are often recorded. I caught myself reflecting on the pointlessness of ironing my clothes (when I don’t have any trips/lectures planned) on the FEMeeting discussion recently and then thought, gosh I hope researchers aren’t studying this video in future years and I’m remembered for that!
I use lots of social media platforms and messaging platforms. Twitter is great to keep in touch with science colleagues. I still think I prefer one-to-one chats best. I guess it just depends on what kind of person you are and maybe the social interaction rules of Zoom are not quite defined yet, some have said it’s because harder to read people’s body language. I guess there are cultural differences too and Brits like me are quite reticent in pushing themselves forward so we quite often stay quiet unless asked something directly.
It’s certainly a time for learning different online behaviours and norms. This new culture is changing so much of what we do, and in many cases transforming it for the better. I imagine for an artist it must be a very provoking time to make work. Could you tell us about any new artworks on the horizon in response to the COVID-19 pandemic?
I’m still liaising with many of my collaborators working with infectious diseases, which is fascinating as many of them are working directly on the pandemic in some form, and I very much want to bring those experiences into my work. I’ve been expanding my project “Ex Voto”, which is a large-scale installation that explores the impact of infectious diseases and antibiotics on our lives, created through the making of ‘secular’ ‘votive offerings’. The ‘votives’ are hung on ribbons, stained or dyed with bacteria, including various species of gut microbiota, Staphylococcus aureus and modified antibiotic-producing Streptomyces (all sterilised), as well as natural antimicrobial substances such as madder root, and non-hazardous chemical dyes used in the lab. I’m making a new series of votives that explore our experiences of the lock down period, the impacts of the pandemic and the scientific and medical research taking place.
Ex Voto (2020) Dumitriu, A
I’m also working on some other new projects - one called “Susceptible” about new antibiotic research in Tuberculosis which is going to be launched online in June in a Russian art festival called Everart. Another project is a commission by Art/Data/Health exploring the impact of the lockdown on domestic violence.
I’m a bit nocturnal now as everyone seems to have a slower start to the day and there’s no real reason to stop working however late it gets. I have a humanoid robot in the sitting room watching me. It’s from the Vertigo STARTS residency Alex May and I just completed with Schindler, but we continue to tweak and improve it during this period. And on my balcony I’m trying to grow some Chicory plants as part of my “Biotechnology from the Blue Flower” project, also with Alex May.
I love this image of you working alongside your robot. I think we all feel a little watched by our technologies in this time of immersion in online lectures, seminars and Meet-ups. What message would you like to get across to audiences who are experiencing our current epidemic?
I would encourage people to think critically about newspaper and online stories. The majority of what I see shared on social media is clickbait designed to frighten people and keep them in an endless loop of reading and sharing. Much of this way of influencing is tied to audience numbers and advertising revenue rather than informing people. Even the more reliable Reuters news agency is succumbing with Facebook posts such as: “South Korean health authorities raised new concerns about the novel coronavirus after reporting last month that dozens of patients who had recovered from the illness later tested positive again” when in fact the headline of the story was “Explainer: South Korean findings suggest 'reinfected' coronavirus cases are false positives”.
I’m all for scientific debate and the need to provide rapid opportunities for discourse but the increase of preprints (scientific studies published before peer review) also has the issue that some poor studies gain huge amounts of coverage where important work isn’t featured by the press at all but goes into the canon of knowledge of those seriously working in the field. Which is why you have a disparity between what leading scientists for example in the UK advise, and what the public believe to be true.
For example, as I write now in the 6th week of lockdown in the UK I see many social media friends from the arts insisting the lockdown continues indefinitely due to the fact that deaths from COVID-19 are still quite high, however what they should be looking at is the (admittedly harder to find) figures of hospital admissions. It can take more than a month from infection to death, and even then, deaths sometimes take a couple of weeks to be added to the figures. The science and medical advisers do say this in the TV Q&A sessions but no-one reports it because it doesn’t frighten people enough to click and provide advertising revenue. We will only know the real impact in a year or more when we can look at seasonal averages, compared to for example recent influenza deaths.
Yes - misinformation and facts that aren’t totally scientifically accurate could be seriously damaging to how we handle this situation. Looking now into the future, many would agree that it’s unlikely life will return 100% to how it was. How do you think the pandemic will affect how you make work in the future?
I’ve been talking to one of my collaborators about this a lot and about the potential unforeseen collateral impacts of the pandemic. A very important focus of my work is the issue of antibiotic resistance, the process by which disease-causing bacteria are evolving to find ways around the treatments we rely on, an issue described by the former Chief Medical Officer of England Dame Sally Davies as a threat great as that from climate change.
Antibiotic resistance is often caused by over-prescription of antibiotics (as well as environmental and agricultural use. There is a lot of antibiotic use for COVID-19 patients for prophylaxis and treatment related bacterial pneumonias for example. I heard yesterday that also dentists have also been told to prescribe antibiotics more frequently so patients don’t need to attend surgeries at the moment. So, this will likely have a huge impact on antibiotic resistance levels and future related deaths from untreatable infections. I imagine this will continue to be a huge focus of my work.
I’m also interested in the impact on biomedical research in general, both positives and negatives. There’s been an enormous amount of international collaboration which has been fantastic but there’s also the fact that so many important scientific research projects have been halted in their tracks. I want to see how this evolves. Many funders are taking this into account but I think there will be unforeseen impacts. This will be true for art making too. Probably for a while attendance at exhibition openings will be reduced and I’ll need to make sure that galleries can install my work on site with my instructions rather than my presence being needed every time. I think there will be a financial impact to the arts too, but in the UK for example we have also seen a massive uptake in arts and crafts activities during the lockdown so hopefully that realisation of the importance of art in people’s lives will continue.
Biography see: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/biography/
Website: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/
