Holobiont Collaboratory is an experiment in collaboration across the social sciences, natural sciences and the arts; towards transformative social change. We draw on aesthetic tools and contextualised biological data to tell stories of humans and their resident microbes. Our stories take many forms – visual, verbal, immersive, taste-led, meditative. Ultimately, we aim to increase collective capacity to flourish within the complexity of the living world – from within our senses and imaginations.

The complex ‘we’ that is the Holobiont Collaboratory navigates multiple forms of coherence. Artistic coherence, social scientific coherence and – at the forefront of our mind, the coherence of situated intervention. We dance between facts, contexts and affects.

Holobiont
An individual consortium of multiple genomes living together in one place (often called a “body”) maintained through inter-dependent metabolisms. A unit that is both individual and collective – an "I" and a "We."

Collaboratory 
An assemblage of the diverse organisms producing experiments through creative symbiosis. Their practices interact rather than merge, generating novel coherences – a space for artistic and academic exploration. 

Holobiont Collaboratory creates aesthetic encounters with microbiome knowledges, contextualised as a product of specific cultures, technological know-hows and intellectual trajectories. We focus on the concept of holobiont – as an entrypoint into the more-than-human dimensions of the body. We do not aim to explain but to involve participants in sensing, imagining and transforming holobiontness in the Anthropocene.

Holobiont Collaboratory was initiated by researcher Joana Formosinho and artist duo Baum & Leahy working within networks of multidisciplinary collaborations. Conceptual development supported by a CBSS artistic fellowship at the University of Edinburgh.

Holobiont Collaboratory was initiated by researcher Joana Formosinho and artist duo Baum & Leahy working within networks of multidisciplinary collaborations. Supported by CBSS artistic fellowship.