Creative collaboration - 'Gutscapes'

Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

Joana: I’m a researcher within the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Edinburgh. Whilst developing Gutscapes, I was working at the Usher Institute’s Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society. My work turns around the social and cultural dimensions of biological knowledges — particularly microbiome research. I research knowledge-making trajectories, and how knowledge-making shapes society. Public engagement is key to my life as a researcher; I enjoy it, and it’s also a means of staying socially relevant and responsive.

Baum & Leahy: We are a Denmark- and UK-based creative studio who collaborate with practitioners across disciplines to open up, question and sensorialise scientific research into tactile, participatory experiences. For the past year we have been Visiting Arts Fellows at the Centre for Biomedicine, Self and Society at the University of Edinburgh, which has given us the opportunity to delve deeper into our arts-research collaboration with Joana, exploring the intersections and artistic potentials of biological and social phenomena that make up holobionts [note: a holobiont is an interconnected system of organisms living in close association with each other]. Part of this included devising Gutscapes: Meditative Encounters with Microbial Messmates which we facilitated at Being Human Festival 2024.  

Can you tell us a bit more about the format of your event and the research it was based on? 

The event was designed to invite attendees into a guided journey within the insides of the human digestive tract. We told stories of the gut as a complex ecological landscape; a more-than-human place where microbial lives thrive and ail.  

Specifically, we focused on the gut mucosa, a gelatinous structure that simultaneously acts as separator and relator: a barrier to stop microbes entering the bloodstream, and a substrate that microbiota feed and live on. We combined live storytelling drawing from scientific data and imagery, with a guided meditative journey where facts mingled with imagination and sensations.  

We aimed to create an inviting space where participants could engage thinking, senses and imagination. We also wanted this to be a shared, communal experience that could spark discussion and reflection.  

After the guided journey, participants engaged in brief individual reflection, followed by eating together (‘feeding the microbes!’) and then group discussion. The event was informed by Joana Formosinho’s research on the social dimensions of microbiomes, particularly the ways in which the research field is putting pressure on binary categories such as body/environment, human/non-human — and individual/community.  

Rather than providing definitive answers, our goal was to build participants’ capacity to engage with these tensions: recognising that the human body is also an environment, and the individual is also a microbial community. Finally, we aimed to spark debates and inspire conversations around how healthcare and governance structures might need to change in response to this understanding of the body. 

What are the different things you thought both sides brought to the partnership?

Joana: As artists, Baum & Leahy have a very tactile, immersive sensibility which ‘plunges’ one in the art. It has an invitational quality to it, and a playful tone. This is synergetic with my interest in creating spaces where the body — and microbiome data — can be felt and experienced as a complex ecological landscape.  

This kind of synergy is important to take into account when choosing the right partner in an art-science collaboration. Your ethics and aesthetics should ‘speak together’. Working with Baum & Leahy is greatly helpful for me in pushing academic public engagement beyond the verbal, and into the experiential. They have the aesthetic tools to foreground lived experience.  

Together, we integrate this lived experience with critical contextualisation of the data; and we open a space for participatory discussion. Scientific controversies become shared social experiences.

Baum & Leahy: Joana expressed our arts-research symbiosis beautifully in the above. ‘Depth’ is a word that comes to mind when we reflect on what the collaboration brings. When collaborating with Joana, and in particular within a nourishing framework such as the CBSS fellowship, we get to work much more in depth with the research and planning of the public engagement work, asking what we wish to communicate or start discussions about, why and then how to best do this.  

Working with Joana brings in rigour and depth, sensitivity and attention to the subject matter, and at the same time breadth and a holistic approach focusing on the dynamics between scientific, social, and experiential perspectives. And then – as Joana mentioned – we share a harder-to-define aesthetic sense and energy, where we enjoy playing with the malleability of language, imagining multiscalar landscapes anew, and dreaming up future holobiont worlds and ways of being.  

What did you each take away from the event? How will this shape your work together moving forward?

Joana: My main take away from the event was how much desire and capacity there is to be together in this kind of experiential group enquiry. Discussion time went in many directions — from the challenges of imagining scientific facts, to the value of meditative experience as a group, to a sense of empathy (and disgust) for microbial lives, renewed appreciation for the complexity of the human body, and discussions around the challenges of caring for visceral ecologies.  

It is rewarding to feel an immediate sense of impact, and this makes the considerable amount of work that goes into it feel worthwhile. I highly recommend interacting with participants — and approaching them as co-creators of the experience. This participatory engagement is something that we have created more and more space for throughout our years of collaboration.

Baum & Leahy: We have done three iterations of Gutscapes now, each time with an adapted narrative that is constantly being re-written to reflect current discussions around the biosocial dimensions of microbiome research, as well as responses from participants in previous events. It has been interesting to see how certain themes within the feedback and conversations either remain continuous, or respond to these changes in the narrative. We will continue to work with this framework of Gutscapes as a live art-research inquiry and reflexive process incorporating public engagement responses.   

Do you have any top tips or advice for future event organisers? 

• Build trust with your collaborators in advance, and invest in long-term collaborative relationships
• Choose the venue carefully, and think about the audience you are likely to attract there. Incorporate that understanding of audience into the structure of your event
• Visit the venue beforehand— and establish contact with staff. Help your venue help you (e.g. by asking them to advertise the event)
• Plan carefully, but then also be open to change in response to what happens on the day
• Be inclusive of different modes of participation, e.g. by allowing time for group discussion as well as individual reflection
• Set aside time after the event to reflect as a team. Celebrate the successes! – and also make a list of things that you would do differently next time
• Plan the event around a topic that you are passionate about. That passion will show, and really does make up for the inevitable nerves and mishaps
• Stay playful throughout!