Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time

In this talk, Maya Hey, Postdoctoral Researcher, Environmental Humanities Lab at KTH Royal Technical Institute, introduces her forthcoming monograph on fermentation, in which she theorises human-microbe relations now and ahead. Microbes are everywhere, all of the time, making up our bodies and environments in ways that confound what it means to be ‘human’ on this highly microbial planet. By focusing on the process of making ferments, versus its outcomes, she examines the hands-on, repeated, material practices of fermentation that render certain futures more possible than others. Based on a sensory/multispecies ethnography at a natural sake brewery in Japan, she uses the brewing process, its environments, tools, rituals, seasonality, and know-how to show the more-than-human entanglements at the scale of a business venture. Uniquely, this brewery does not add vials of yeast and bacteria like an ingredient; so the work of brewing entails perpetually creating conditions for ambient microbes to gather—and only certain microbes, at certain stages, in certain sequences. By taking into account this living world and its specificities, the brewers must attune, adapt, and ascertain which microbes need what and when. They practice what she describes as an improvisational ethic that adapts to the unforeseen. Hey suggests this ethic as a way to continue living with/in unknowable, multispecies worlds and concludes by prompting: what kinds of futures do we want to improvise with microbes?