Fermentations Manifestations ~ Material | Metaphor | Methodology | Method

What can fermentation teach us about how knowledge moves, is shared, and absorbed across difference?

This container—Fermentations Manifestations—gathers four fermenting threads that shape and express my ongoing research into the entangled relationship across pedagogy × art × the curatorial. It asks what becomes possible when difficulty is welcomed, when agitation is not resolved but held, and when learning is understood as a relational, embodied, and more-than-human encounter.

These four terms are not themes, they are practices. They are alive, leaky, and in motion. Each is animated by fermentation and articulated through fermentology—a situated methodology that is porous, collaborative, and committed to relational transformation.

• Material is animated as the site of encounter and the fermencises. It refers to the fermenting bodies—microbial, human, vegetal, institutional—that shape my research. Material holds lineage, labour, and memory. It bubbles. It bruises. It spoils and heals. It is where pedagogy is enacted not through concept, but through touch, gesture, and co-presence.

• Metaphor is expressed through the fermentelligences—a cluster of speculative and affective concepts that offer language and orientation for navigating complexity, discomfort, and relational entanglement. From the Latin fervere (to boil), fermentation becomes a way to think-with bubbling, agitation, and poly-temporal rhythms. These intelligences invite multiplicity and resist resolution.

• Methodology is articulated as fermentology. This is not a fixed framework, but a living, situated approach to inquiry. Fermentology embraces slowness, collaborative survival, and the generative instability of difference. It centres productive agitation (Chen, 2018) and invites deep learning where “our purpose is not really to feel good” (hooks, 1994, p.154), but to stay with complexity.

• Method is animated through the fermethod—chopping, soaking, packing, bubbling—that give form to practice. These are not linear steps but relational movements that inform the pedagogical, artistic, and curatorial choices I make. fermethod becomes a way to hold the uncurriculum: slow, leaky, embodied, emergent.

Together, these manifestations offer a practice for troubling hierarchies, disciplinary boundaries, cultivating relational ethics, and reimagining what it means to learn with, alongside, and because of others—human and more-than-human.