Microbial Theatricality: Selfmade, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger

Elizabeth McQueen

doi:10.33303/gpsv6n1-2a133

Authors

Elizabeth McQueen University of California, Los Angeles

Keywords:

food, celebrity, taste, nonhuman performance, microbes

Abstract

In 2013, Christina Agapakis, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, swabbed celebrities' armpits, belly buttons, and feet for microbial samples to make cheese. The “human-made” cheese resulted in the art exhibition Selfmade, a sensory installation inviting audience members to confront intimate and smelly relationships between humans and microbes, all through fermented edible matter. Artist Olafur Eliasson, food journalist Michael Pollan, and baker and writer Ruby Tandoh all offered their bodies as cultivators for cheese production. The prominent figures, and their companion bacteria, validate and complicate the relations that Selfmade claims to produce. At first glance, the installation invites a sensory entanglement with nonhuman matter. There is, of course, more than meets the eye. Hunger, eating, and even cooking are not exclusive to humans but perhaps intrinsic to planetary life. Human, celebrity, and microbial actors blur across the many mediums materialized in the food performance. As much as Selfmade is a nonhuman performance, it is also because of its very humanness, celebrity, and theatricality that we find an essential entanglement in food and performance studies: a nearly imperceptible (or non-sensible) proximity of human and nonhuman, at the microscopic scale.

Author Biography

Elizabeth McQueen, University of California, Los Angeles

Elizabeth McQueen is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA in Theater and Performance Studies with a graduate certificate in Food Studies. Her research examines the contradictions, anxieties, and aesthetics of contemporary performances that utilize food, from transnational performance art to global entertainment venues. Reflecting the collaborative nature of theater, she works with policymakers, nonprofits, chefs, and artists to contextualize and critically engage with food. She is a 2023-24 UC Office of the President Global Food Initiative Fellow and the recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award for Teaching Assistants at UCLA.

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