“[…] trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind.” Adrienne Rich, from “Planetarium,” 1968
It’s been 86 days since Lockdown. Tomorrow it will be day 87, and the next, 88. On day
three, dry yeast disappeared from grocery store shelves. I come from a long line of
bakers: my great grandfather, my grandfather, and my father. As a carrier of the genetic
code for flour, the self-replicating fleur de farine is in my deoxyribonucleic acid. On day
four, I launched my wild yeast starter. On day 10 she tried to escape her glass mason jar
container. At first, I was annoyed in the wake of the tidal-like spillage seeping across my
kitchen counter, but that quickly diminished when it dawned on me that I was
witnessing a demonstration of will against sheltering in place, against being
quarantined. The chemistry of wild yeast is in a symbiotic relationship with its molecular
environment; it survives in its very refusal to be contained —it becomes itself through
an orgasmic and messy egress of self-emancipation. Wild yeast is in the air (everywhere)
and the imagined sense to capture the daughter cells belies its nature to resist captivity.
The etymology of quarantine arrives from early 14th century Italian quaranta giorni and
the Venetian nomenclature describing the 40-day period that ships were forced to stay
in port with its passengers during the Black Death plague. Entering the 16th century the
word was used in English demarcating the duration a widow could reside in her dead
husband’s house—40 days. This work’s media and photography play with
the allegorical configurations of language, gender, resistance, the domestic, the
daughter, and the bonding cells of enunciation, ambiguity, and release found in a small
corner on my kitchen counter.
nineteenthcenturygirl 