As we were sourdough bread

How can we open space in a saturated present?
In the society of information and hyper-regularization, we need to reach alternative paradigms that allow us to transgress the limits of capitalist thought. Alternative scenarios to the apocalypse and Game over which can allow us to broaden our vision of the possible.
But where can we start?








There is something in fermenting: a living wait, an understanding that thousands of organisms are transforming matter. A degree of acidity, a texture: some knowledge to be smelled, to be sensed. Fermentation forces us to face the immense life that exists in death and decomposition. It makes us confront otherness in a process that our sight can never completely comprehend, of which we can only feel its effects.






Can we open new perspectives, create new thought, following the logics of





There is no exact recipe for making sourdough, everyone must find their own technique that suits each place. “No matter what they start as, sourdough starters are not static microbial entities”. They become their environment and, to a lesser degree, what they are fed.” [2]
Sourdough "is" its environment. It is the particles in the air, the humidity of the environment, the temperature, the light. A sourdough must be understood to know how to act, it leads us to rely on smell and intuition. To understand it must be done, start fermenting.




Give us water. Give us water to live, give me water to connect. Make our environment a soft place. Soft in order to grow, soft in order to expand myself, in order to form bubbles. Bubbles to stay alive, bubbles so we can breathe within this intrinsic viscosity. Small empty spaces filled with air.
I will make of my environment a body, a malleable, soft body. A body that changes and transforms. An overflowing body.

We do not mind spilling, for to spill is to expand.
We are many.
You can’t see us, but you can feel our absence.
You can’t see us, but you can smell us.
You can’t see us, but we hold the world.
We are everywhere: on your skin, in your brain, in your stomach.
Give me water.
We know you have been ignoring us. We don’t care.
We are the creators of matter.

The first indicator that the sourdough is starting to grow is bubbles.
Creating bubbles requires a soft, malleable environment. It takes time, it takes water. Water to be wet. It demands to let the dough rest, make a soft, tender place. Let it change. Let reality ferment, encounter the Inter specie network that surrounds us, make it malleable. We want to smell it, to perceive it, to intuit it. Add water to make us wet. Let’s change the state of matter, lets become our environment.
In order to speculate is necessary to open bags of empty space, to fill them with air, to fill them with possibilities, to breathe. This way we will be able to open temporal spaces out of control where new thoughts could grow, temporary autonomous zones
"Pockets of air and spaces of exception, even isolated, hidden spaces where to go for nourishment or rest. We should make many such spaces, even if they are temporary. We can draft the weirdest most creative of exceptions inside these pockets, imagine new stories, write new rules." [3]






Speculation grows in that space at the tip of the tongue, in that corner that we sense out of the corner of our eye. It is that place where we will never fully situate ourselves but which we recognize and can become comfortable with. It lives in the place where the things that we do not get to say rest, that space that cannot be defined with words because it must always be kept open.





She said when you knead the structures break down. You must break the structures to gain elasticity. Write in a doughy state.
Sonia Fernándeez Pan said: "Write like kneading bread. Or mud. Writing in Vaseline. Writing in cement. There are texts that, instead of eroding over the years, acquire more and more strength. I suppose that there are also calcareous, porous texts. To write like kneading bread, the words would have to exist previously in a doughy state instead of appearing from different search tactics."
Thinking in doughy mode. Speculating like baking bread, like making love. Kneading collective stories, we could reach unexpected and unrecognizable territories and make them a familiar place.
Let’s explore the corners calmly, explore the margins. Let them rest to grow, to expand. Prepare the ground, cook slowly. Try, fail. Overcook, burn, break, bite.


Chew
Swallow
Digest
Absorb
Expel
Cultivate
Mix
Wait
Knead
Bake
Bite

Knead more. She said: when you knead the structures break. You must break the structures to gain elasticity. Elasticity will be the crucial element. It is important that the dough is soft enough to be able to expand without tearing. It is important to be soft. Is important to always have bubbles to be able to breathe.




Each cereal is different: wheat flour, rye flour, barley flour... Each one has its own particularities: to be more or less worked, to add more or less water. The important thing is to remain soft to fall on top of the others, to occupy the entire surface. Let's hit back like corn flour, like
Let's adapt our viscosity depending on the degree of temperature and tension.




Knead while touching. She said: You have to notice when the dough is sufficiently worked, you have to sense it, you have to touch it. What is touching? I felt and wondered how many millions of bacteria (those I had been caring for, nurturing, observing, commenting on) must now be in my hands.






"His skin showed him what it meant to be dead. The outer, dead layer contrasted sharply with what he could perceive of the living flesh underneath" [7]. There is life and death in my hands. There are bacteria dying and reproducing on my hands.


Think in a soft way. Imagine things as if you were clay. Speculate how to be mud. Speculate as mud. How to be productive hummus, how to be able to embrace your roots? Let ourselves be crossed, be home to all kinds of lives. In order to be habitat. In order to be malleable, soft, adaptable. You were looking up and you didn't notice, but I left your house full of footprints.
Knead the words, form a ball, let it grow. Take one part, make compost with the other. Feed it, let it rest. Wait.


What does it mean to do nothing? Can we lose time? Can you kill time?
In the summer we were investigating where the lost time went. Was it lost, or was it stolen from us? If so, who had stolen it, and where was it kept? We would take to the streets to demand the right to our time and to demonstrate against the injustice that someone had decided, without asking, that a day should have 24 hours. We want our 5 minutes more in the morning, we want our time back!

I learned from Ariadna Guiteras that Hacer pan como follar es un beneficio burgués (making bread as well as fucking is a bourgeois profit). Let us reclaim, then, our profit. We defend non-doing as an anti-capitalist productive practice against the monetization of time.
To make bread, it must be left to rest. What must be done is not to do. Wait.


Do nothing allows things happen, wait to give space to the other. Allow bubbles to be formed. If its bubbly it means that it's alive.
In order to make clay, it must be allowed to settle. What must be done is not to do. Wait.
1. Take soil
2. Filter it to remove the stones, and larger branches.
3. Mix it with an abundant amount of water.
4. Let the cloudy water stand until it settles.
5. Throw away the excess water
6. Put the clay in cloths and wait until it takes the right consistency.

What can we do with a troubled present? [8] She said:
Let reality rest, let it ferment to create new spaces and let them burst, let new ones form. We want to occupy all the space of the container, to overflow it. Let us sediment to see which matters are heavy and fall down and which ones are floating on the surface. Cook it.
 






The cold of winter in Belgium made me embody the importance of heat. Our kitchen is so cold that the oil curdles and doesn't come down from the pot, so we had to put it on the stove for a while. Any excuse is a good one to turn on the stove.
The heat reminds us of our porous condition, sweating evidences our permeability and our continuous becoming fountain. Thousands of droplets passing through our skin. When does the water I expel stop being part of me? Is it in the moment it leaves contact with my skin and falls to the ground? Is the mark on the ground still part of me? Is it the water I drink part of me in the moment it touches my lips, or when it reaches my stomach?
Any excuse is a good one to turn on the oven and gather around the heat together. Any excuse is good to gather together, bring us closer, is your skin in contact with mine now part of me? Bake mushy thoughts, watch them grow. Make time to waste, get distracted and burn the bread, start over. Turn on the water, drink the oven. Knead the words, mix them, go through ideas in a porous state. Let’s inhabit autonomous spaces and embrace their temporary condition until they explode.
Try to tune with bacteria, fail dramatically. Occupy the entire space of our container and overflow it, sweat. We continue in each other, we mingle. We fall, soft, on each other and knead each other. Take one part, make compost with the other. Leave a trace.
Is the trace still part of us? Is the memory of the trace still part of me?
Chew, swallow the matter in a pasty state (thousands of dead bacteria in contact with my tongue, my trachea, my stomach). Digesting, absorbing, expelling. Begin again. We will become a soft habitat to shelter the bubbles, to embrace you. You can't open space in a hard reality, it breaks, it doesn't accept change.
Let's inhabit a soft thinking, flexibility will be the basis of our stability.

We, within the walls of our homes, took refuge from an absurd society and created our own community. Making a vegetable garden, cooking for others, sharing time and conversations... Between the six of us we created a network of care to sustain each other that we turned into our act of resistance.
With L. we shared a fondness for fermentation. I have never been a methodical person, so I asked her for help to start making sourdough and together we commented on the transformations of that community of bacteria.

Fermenting

says that "we have to create thought from the everyday life".

Fermentation trains us in seeing the ground as inherently shaky. It makes visible the invisible potential of those things that seem still. The Surface of a cabbage leaf, the smooth quarrel of clay, both brimming with life and time. […] Fermentation is an option to the microscope, it is not about relating to these phenomena by images but rather by their character. What they like to do, how they thrive. You attune yourself not to distinguish strains of life but to recognize its presence and consequences. [1]

Every day we would review and comment on the state of that living mass that was slowly evolving while we shamelessly humanized the process, projecting our intentions on it: "I think it is happy today".
I cared for them more and more and wondered if I was getting attached to the dough, to the expectations of the future bread, or to the bacteria that had formed their habitat inside the little glass jar. Is it possible to tune in to bacteria?

-Do you think we are doing it right?
-If it’s bubbly it means that it’s alive- Said L.

I have something for you - She said, and took out of the bag a

As soon as the TAZ is named (represented, mediated), it must vanish, it will vanish, leaving behind it an empty husk, only to spring up again somewhere else, once again invisible because undefinable in terms of the Spectacle. The TAZ is thus a perfect tactic for an era in which the State is omnipresent and all-powerful and yet simultaneously riddled with cracks and vacancies. And because the TAZ is a microcosm of that “anarchist dream” of a free culture, I can think of no better tactic by which to work toward that goal while at the same time experiencing some of its benefits here and now. [4]

-It's for when you make your first bread.

Kneading

You know, for large buildings to hold up they must have a certain degree of elasticity. If you climb to the top of a big building, you can feel it move. If they didn't accept a certain degree of movement, they would break.
She said: elasticity is the basis of stability

Knead more

Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it's tender and pliant. But when it's dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death's companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.”

Knead while touching

Today is the waffle day.
Are you ready? Where are your bubbles?
I’m sorry. After all this time. After all this effort
My effort? Your effort?
I will kill you all.

-That's good. -She said. -Now we must let it rest.

-Now what you have to do is do nothing, let it rest. How anti-capitalist is this?

-How long? - I asked. - This depends on the bread, you will have to see.

Bake it.

Meantime, inside our bubble we speculated alternative realities where the feeling of being held in the other had become our revolution.

I am far from the bread: I have chosen to stay on the diaphanous floor of the international airport, I have come to prostrate myself before the permanence of its illumination. The term anteroom arose here and here it will remain. Everything necessary is in this place, this is where we learned the language of the simultaneous, the opposite actions to baking bread: choosing food packaged in plastic, opening it and eating it while watching the screens. [9]

[1] Mercedes Villalba, /Fervent Manifesto/ (Colombia: Calipso Press, 2019), 17-19.
[2] Sandor Ellix Katz, /The Art of Fermentation/ (White River Junction: Chelsea Green, 2012), 233.
[3] Villalba, /Fervent/, 13.
[4] Hakim Bey, /T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone,Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism/ (The Anarchist Library, 1985), 95.


[5] Ursula. K. Le Guin, /The lathe of heaven/ (1971), 120.
[6] /Stalker/, directed by Andréi Tarkovsky, (USSR: Mosfilm, 1979), quoted in Beatriz Alonso, “Hace Mucho que te Quiero” in /Querer Parecer Noche/ (Madrid: CAM2, 2018), 228.
[7] Octavia Butler, /La estirpe de Lilith. Triología Xenogénesis/, (Barcelona: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, 2021),
[8] Trouble is an interesting word. It derives from a thirteenth-centuryFrench verb meaning “to stir up,” “to make cloudy,” “to disturb.” Donna Haraway, /Seguir con el problema/, trad. Helen Torres, (Bilbao: Consomni, 2019), 19
[9] Mercedes Cebrián. /Mercado Común/ (2006), 24.