In Soiling, Sowing, Fermenting, Hong Kong-based artist Lo Lai Lai Natalie presents a fermentation workshop introducing nukazuke (糠漬け), a traditional Japanese fermentation method that preserves vegetables in wet rice bran. A paste-like lactic acid fermentation, the process of making nukazuke is reminiscent of the agricultural labour of ploughing soil and sowing seeds, with time as fuel to bring out the harvest. 

Taking farming as a form of social activism since Hong Kong’s land movement in the northwestern New Territories in 2009, Lo’s farming practice is intimately entangled with her video essays on flora, fauna, agrarian lifeways, and foodways. She explores new ways to perceive the vibrancy and heterogeneity in the soil, and new possibilities of collectivity based on an organic, intersubjective thinking with her human and non-human companions. In the workshop, Lo will dive into the soil-based multi-species ecology in her site of daily labour while drawing connections between Hong Kong’s farming soil, nukazuke’s fermenting soil, and the societal soil—all of which brim with vibrant relationality and intense unpredictability.

Soiling, Sowing, Fermenting, combines lecture and food preparation tutorial, collective discussion and collaborative cooking, farming and fermenting. It explores how tending to soil becomes a form of social engagement, how to cultivate microbiota that weaves human life into the sense of a whole, and how to act vibrantly with and within one another to bring about transformation and a hopeful decay. The workshop produces a (living) installation with nukazuke made by the participants. The installation will find temporary lodgement at HKW until the end of the year.

The workshop is followed by L is for the Way You Look at Me’s opening event and an evening screening.