Recaliming what is ours
Exploring connections between instinct and intuition, the gut, fermentation, divination and our micro-organic ancestors.
The Instinct Lab is a new project and part of The Bakery of Slow ideas. Drawing on ideas surrounding micro-biology, ritual, and food sovereignty, it’s a collective experiment in fermentation, divination, and creative action, which seeks out new ways to empower us to make positive decisions in our lives, our communities, and the world we inhabit.
Underpinning the project are ideas drawn from the contemporary feminist thinker Silvia Federici, whose work expertly reveals how the demonization of autonomous women and the creation of the archetype of the witch was fundamental to the development of the European patriarchal, colonial, capitalist project. Inspired by her analysis - this project seeks to nurture that which has been denigrated and destroyed - collective struggle, common ownership, and autonomous approaches to one's health and community knowledge.
Can embracing and reclaiming practices which have been forgotten, demonized, and more recently commercialized - fermentation, herbalism, divination - support us to trust our instincts and intuition and help us to make positive decisions in our communities and beyond? Can listening deeply to the gut help guide us toward a more caring and fulfilling future?
The Instinct Lab: Gut Grief is the project’s first iteration; a collaboration with Heart of Glass and Incredible Edible, Knowsley - a thriving community garden just outside Liverpool. Throughout 2024 we're having a series of residencies at the garden. So far we've been making kimchi and remembering our ancestors, fermenting cabbages alongside DIY tarot; divining through beetroot kvass ink painting, and brewing intention-filled fervida (a 5-year ferment) for the next generation.
We’ve also been working with community members at Incredible Edible to build The Home of the Spirit of the Ferment - a beautiful shed, inspired by the spaces that house ancestral and Orixa spirits in Afro Brazillian/Yoruba spiritual traditions. The Home of the Spirit of the Ferment is a special place to sit, contemplate, connect with our ancestors, and observe the ferments as they transform.
In Autumn 2024 we return to Incredible Edible for more explorations into fermentation and divination and continue to ask how we can nourish our belief in and capacity for collective-governance? Following another week at the community garden we’ll be taking up residency at Make CIC community space in Huyton (an ex-shop in the centre of town), where we’ll programme a whole host of interactive activities, talks, installations, workshops, and divinatory readings.
The Instict Lab is an interactive community research project, which we hope to continue developing in connection with more communities in the future. Get in touch to discuss it with us.
Creative Team
Conceived of by Leo Kay
Created and developed by Leo Kay & Anna Smith (Unfinished Business)
The Instinct Lab-Gut Grief (2024):
Hosted by Karen Mower (Incredible Edible)
Produced by Heart of Glass
"I really like the link between fermented food, our ancestors, the future, the past divination, because those are also things I'm interested in and I think it's easy to separate those things out, but I love to see them interconnected and interconnectedness and things, that was very important to me. It's given me a wider perspective, on all kinds of things, and I want to go out there now and learn more."
