This is my sourdough starter. It has been moving around with me in the last year and a half and in less than 3 weeks we will go on a journey as the Bureau of Slow Endeavours from Galicia in Spain to Potsdam in Germany. A 6 day journey by train and boat as part of Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, a 2-year research initiative designed to develop a more sustainable model for artist residencies. A sourdough starter, masa madre —mother dough— in Spanish, is used to make bread but I am just as interested, maybe even more, in experiencing how working with —which means living with— an other-than-human organism opens up a thinking process about notions of care and how to relate to non-human entities. I have to admit I haven’t given it the best care possible in the last months, sometimes storing it in the fridge for longer periods of time or throwing out the so called discard—the part you don’t need when feeding your starter—instead of using it for something other than making bread.
It is still not too warm in Galicia so I use wool from the sheep that are herded on the heath close to my house in the Netherlands to keep my starter warm and happy.
Can a community of bacteria and yeast be happy? And does my sourdough starter have a name (people asked me)? Which leads to the subject of anthropomorphism: the attribution of human traits, emotions, intentions or behaviours to non-human entities. More about that some other time.
