Hidden Third Partner: in the company of yeast

Workshop: Monday 6 October 2025 . 2pm-5.30pm

Centre for Art and Ecology Seminar Room 

41 Lewisham Way, New Cross, London, SE14 6QD

With Ayşe Köklü, Brandon LaBelle, Jol Thoms, and support from Aural Pluralities. 

In-person event: Max. 20 participants Free to attend. 

Following the first workshop in communion with "wild" local yeast at the Art and Ecology Garden(Goldsmiths) on June 23rd, this second session is dedicated to sharing the process of living, sensing and attending to the sourdough starters participants started collectively and took with them in June, literally and/or symbolically. Through such focus, we are interested in nurturing greater understanding for the hidden partners that are central to life and cultivating a listening praxis that values mutual recognition, interdependence, and cooperation inspired by bacteria.

The last hour is an informal sharing and celebrating microbial companionship and new stories and connections emerged in the process. It is open to all local communities. Please join us in breaking bread together.

You can still join the workshop even if you haven’t  participated in the first workshop. If you would like to however collect some sourdough starter to experiment with a listening praxis and share your process, please contact Ayşe Köklü for more information: akokl001@gold.ac.uk

Schedule: 

14:00 Welcome and acknowledgements

14:15 - 14:25 A microbiomal meditation (Jol Thoms)

14:25 – 14:55 Checking in & Reflecting on the process

14:55 – 15:05   Online Q&A with yeast expert Gülsüm

15:05 –  16:05  Critical reading & discussion

16:05  – 16:35 Theoretical and practical framework mapping and discussing next steps

16:35  – 17:30 Bread & spread sharing and listening exercise (Open to all) Lichten tea and bread will be supplied. Please bring a spread to share with others. This is open to all to drop in (4.30-5.30pm). No need to sign up - just turn up (with your spread)! 

Location: 

Centre for Art and Ecology Seminar Room, 41 Lewisham Way*, New Cross, London, SE14 6QD. 

Location map / what3words: /////dogs.poster.even

*access to the garden is via a wooden gate on Parkfield Road

Please contact us if you would like to discuss your accessibility requirements: 

akokl001@gold.ac.uk/ Ayşe: 0787 605 2734

Artist Biographies: 

Ayşe Köklü is an artist and researcher based between London and Turkey. Her transdisciplinary practice spans sound-works, participatory radio shows, workshops and DIY technologies, with a key focus on the concept of ‘thresholds’: where power imbalances manifest themselves and can be renegotiated. Using speculative and performative approaches, and feminist technoscience studies, Ayşe enquires about the boundaries between institutional authority and informal know-how, unmeasurability and value, unquantifiable and recognition. Ayşe is a Lecturer, and an Arts Learning Producer currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths (Education & Music). Her project, Learning to Whistle, Whistling to Learn: Developing an arts-based participatory pedagogy for, and with, the endangered Turkish whistled language Islikdili, is supported by the University of London Scholars Programme Studentship award.

Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, listening and questions of agency. Guided by situated and collaborative methodologies, he develops artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with others. From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling, and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making, as well as extra-institutional initiatives, including The Listening Biennial and Academy which he currently directs. He is also currently working as a research fellow at the National Hellenic Research Foundation for the ERC project MUTE (Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing).

Jol Thoms (b. Toronto) is an artist, sound designer, and researcher based in London, UK. His transdisciplinary fieldwork and critical audio/visual practices interrogate the West's troubled relationships with Nature, Technology, and Cosmos by signalling beyond the purely measurable and quantifiable, and by thinking, feeling, and sensing with more-than-human worlds. His compositions, lecture-performances, and educational experimentations emerge from site-based fieldwork in remote ‘landscape-laboratories’ situated at the forefront and intersection of experimental physics and environmental stewardship where cosmic and planetary bodies become entangled as vast posthuman sensing arrays. He is currently Studio Lecturer in Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology and MA Art & Politics. He is also a member of the Centre for Art & Ecology.

AuralPluralities Network is a CHASE research network led by and for academics, scholars and creative practitioners dedicated to addressing, and extending upon, the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in the Arts and Humanities research: theory and praxis, problematising the onto-epistemological hierarchies associated with sound and audition. The network is a hybrid space acting as: a social hub and a professional forum; a focus for professional practice and debate, both online and in-person; an archive of past research activity; and a website with social media platform. It is structured around a theoretical framework and methodology critiquing normative and hegemonic structures within our contemporary (Western) milieu alongside its associated crises. 

Organised in partnership with the Listening Biennial, Ayşe Köklü, Centre for Art & Ecology and Aural Pluralities.