Staff of Life: Preserving Yeast, Memory, and Humanity

Abstract

The line between life and death is blurry. For one organism to live, others must die, turning first into food, then units of energy, and then fodder for new life. Performance itself is a play between liveliness and stabilizations, sensory immediacy and documented pasts. In the culture and practice of food, parallels abound. A notable yet humble example is witnessed in fermentation practice and the use of starter cultures, whether bacterial, yeasty, or both. Even as such cultures are consumed by a production process, they are renewed by it. This autoethnographic account of a cycle of three performances centred on an inherited sourdough starter explores the ways in which performance with food can act as a process of preservation, as well as an exploration of life, death, and states of being that may exist in between. In using a yeast culture that is more than 25 years old, I have attempted not only to perpetuate the tiny bodies within the flour-water paste but also to embody in a larger way the attitude and essence of the culture’s original user. Probing the preservation of humanness through food practice and artistic improvisation, I propose an alternate sense of memory, ecology, and mortality.