Kaajal Modi
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropocene Encounters

Profile

Biography

Kaajal (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working through creative practices in order to explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) can open up novel speculations on how we might create more resilient futures. Their practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates making, fermenting, sound recording and live interactions to create lively and situated encounters between people, microorganisms and ecosystems in ways that invite critical reflection and action. They have recently submitted their practice-based PhD in Art, Design and Science Communication at the University of the West of England, Bristol, partly supported by a research residency with the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition. There they explored food practices with migrant women from the Global Majority in the UK in their own kitchens over lockdown, using fermentation, cooking, and storytelling to explore the more tacit and subtle knowledges to do with culture, ecology and microbiology held in their respective cuisines.

Research

Overview

The focus of my PhD research was on food fermentation explored in collaboration with migrant women and femmes from the Global Majority. I saw this as both a practical mode to reduce food waste in the home, and as a conceptual metaphor through which to invite conversations about climate, culture, colonialism and relational ecologies. The research was partly supported by the Eden Project’s Invisible Worlds exhibition, and the Big Lunch 2020. The work resulted in a multispecies soundscape developed as part of an audio residency with Radio Arts Catalyst. Other outcomes include a recipe/poetry book, and a series of speculative ‘tasting microbial ecologies’ workshops with Grandmothers Garden, a knowledge sharing platform for people from the Global Majority, Arts Admin, as part of ‘What Shall We Build Here’, a festival of art and ecology, and Arts Catalyst’s Kitchen Club, as part of their Emergent Ecologies programme.

More recently I worked with Newcastle University and Gateshead Council on a project developing artistic modes of research and engagement through which to imagine the living cities of the future. Outcomes included Mud Matters, an eco-art project with filmmaker Michele Allen that is currently in the Baltic as part of the ‘Hinterlands’ show; Crafting Cultures, a project with Fine Art & Architecture students exploring the biomaterial SCOBY through local community crafting practices; and Listen with Mother?, a sound and fermentation installation with artist Louise Mackenzie that explored the same biomaterial for its uses in the lab, the studio and the home, and invited the public to reflect on practices of inter- and intraspecies care and control through the lens of ‘motherhood’ (broadly imagined) as a way to open up the conversation about how we live and work with the micro-organisms with whom we share our environments, our homes and even our bodies.

I am presently a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes (CSSM) at Helsinki University, where I use artistic practices of mutual care as a way to explore the role of microbes within Finnish cultural practices and history.

Projects

Songs of the Water (with Counterpoint Arts and Art Reach)

Cultivating a Microbial Commons

Research group(s)

Heritage for Global Challenges Research Centre

Grants

Counterpoint Arts and Art Reach– Climate Justice and Displacement Artist Fund

External activities

Memberships

Visiting Fellow at the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes, Helsinki University