Ferment Radio

What does it take for a living world to sustain itself? In the 1990s, the Biosphere 2 project attempted to explore this question by sealing people, plants, and animals inside a vast glass structure in the Arizona desert, in the US. Designed as a miniature version of Earth’s biosphere, it was intended to be a self-sustaining system in which matter stayed inside while energy entered in the form of sunlight.Something similar can be done on a much smaller scale, with microbes. Microbial biospheres are small, sealed containers holding communities of microorganisms. Within these tiny worlds, microbes interact with one another and transform their environment, while that environment shapes them in return.In this episode, we speak with India Mansour, a biologist, ecologist, and guest professor at the Free University of Berlin. Her research explores why some microbial communities persist in these closed systems while others fail. What does failure mean in a system that can’t simply be opened and repaired? How many species are needed to sustain a living system? And what can we learn from these tiny worlds about life on Earth, itself a biosphere, just a much bigger one?

In this episode of Microbe Superhero, we meet Upasana Jhariya,  who works at the intersection of microbial ecology, biogeochemical processes, and sustainable wastewater treatment. With her research team at Tohoku University, Japan, they have developed a novel biogenic iron mineral synthesis approach that removes toxic selenate from wastewater.How does it work? Listen to “These bacteria take heavy metals lightly...” an episode of Microbe Superhero, Ferment Radio’s mini-series on innovations involving microbes and the people behind them.

In this episode of Microbe Superhero, we meet Barbara Ribeiro, a marine biologist working at KAUST’s Marine Microbiomes Lab in Saudi Arabia. Her research has focused on understanding the impacts of climate change on sponges and coral reef restoration.How does it work? Listen to “Probiotics are great! Even coral reefs say so” an episode of Microbe Superhero, Ferment Radio’s mini-series on innovations involving microbes and the people behind them.

In this episode of Microbe Superhero, we meet Alexa Zytnick, who, during her doctoral studies at UC Berkeley, explored how bacteria could help recover rare earth elements. These metals are essential to technologies from smartphones to wind turbines, but mining them can harm both people and the environment. Alexa has engineered bacteria to take up these valuable metals from discarded electronics.How does it work? Listen to “Pink bacteria that can mine metals from your phone,” an episode of Microbe Superhero, Ferment Radio’s mini-series on innovations involving microbes and the people behind them.

In this episode of Ferment Radio, we enter the world of Citizen Sandwich, a food and cultural heritage project that materialized during the past Audra Festival in Kaunas, Lithuania. Citizen sandwich was part experimental kitchen, part temporary canteen, part art project, part fermentation lab, and built around hyper-local ingredients, rescued food, and foraging.This project was brought together by Jonas Palekas, a chef working across food research and community, and Sean Roy Parker, an artist exploring post-capital food practices.Together with other food professionals, including yours truly, the project took place in a temporary kitchen at Kavinė Kultūra, Culture Café, right in the heart of Kaunas.This is exactly the kind of projects Ferment Radio promotes, and likes to be in: somewhere between a kitchen, a conversation, and critical practice. Welcome to a brand new episode of Ferment Radio.*People involved in the Citizen Sandwich project:curator: Tautvydas Urbelis, Audraarchitects: Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture (IXL)artists: Gintarė Ramančionytė (LT), Izabelė Šuikaitė (LT), Koekeittiö (FIN), Kristin Wiking (SWE), Liudvikas Buklys (LT) , Moira Tirtha (AUS/IDN) , Vytas Narbutas (LT), Ferment Radio (Aga Pokrywka) (POL/FIN)

What are we actually? Are we more microbial than human? This episode brings together two artists whose practices orbit that question from very different angles: Nathalie Dubois, a bioartist and scientist whose work often centers on microbes, and Adam Zaretsky, a bioartist mixing ecology, biotechnology, non-human relations, body performance, and gastronomy. Nathalie explores how human personality intertwines with the microbiome, and Adam pushes the limits of biological matter and its preservation in museum archives. Even though they take different approaches, they often run into the same questions. Are microbes the puppet masters of humans, or do humans control microbes? Who depends on whom, and how much of that dependence do we even recognize? Their answers go into areas many people find unfamiliar, challenging assumptions about agency, ethics, and co-existence across species.

There’s a moment when it hits you. It happens after some time of gathering bits and pieces of knowledge, experiences, feelings, and observations. It might even come after asking yourself “what am I doing?” multiple times. But suddenly the pieces click and turn into a viewpoint that you want to share with others.Some people find this clarity in the form of a book. One of them is Johnny Drain, who went from making yoghurt in his grandma’s kitchen as a kid to working with high-end restaurants. Johnny is also the author of Adventures in Fermentation, a book that captures his particular take on fermentation, let´s say, somewhere between flavour and sustainability.If you’re wondering why we even need another book on fermentation, tune into Ferment Radio and listen to our latest episode!

More than a collection of fixed truths, science can be an ongoing narrative, one that continually reshapes how we understand bodies, identity, and life itself. In this episode, we explore how scientific ideas evolve, transform, and eventually become obsolete. This shifting nature of knowledge is at the core of our conversation with artist Kirsty Hendry. Through texts and moving images, Hendry’s practice examines the body as a social and cultural construct, with a particular focus on the human microbiome, questioning where the boundaries of the self begin and end.

If you send a mixture of soybeans and koji mold to outer space, will it ferment as miso, even so far away from home?How do you bring it back to Earth? How will it taste like? Can we still call it miso?This is the second part of our conversation with Joshua Evans, from the Sustainable Food Innovation at the Danish Technical University’s Center for Biosustainability. We had previously talked about how miso was sent to space. In this episode, we will find out how it returned to Earth, and what fermenting in space means to earthly food systems.Get ready for a techy and scifi’sh episode, where we learn more about designing an experiment that implies sending fermented food to outer space.

There’s a phenomenon experienced by people who have seen the Earth from outer space. It is known as the “Overview Effect”: a new level of compassion and understanding of how fragile and interconnected life is. What could bring us closer to the Overview Effect without leaving Earth? How can we embody what is hard to grasp, relate to, and integrate into a conscious interconnectedness beyond intellectual understanding? What if, instead of looking from far away, as in the Overview Effect, we looked into ourselves from a microscopic close-up? Could we get closer to a sense of expanded consciousness within the Earth’s ecosystem and beyond our simplified identities?These are the questions that led me to develop the project “Insideview”, an audio-visual ritual to compost human exceptionalism, performed in January 2025, at Helsinki’s SOLU space. Together with an amazing team that included Aga Bułacik, Vaim Sarv, and Ola Zielińska, we intertwined folk songs, ferments, words, and holographic projections of the human microbiome to set on a dreamy journey to re-imagine our relationship with the living world, both within and around us. Drawing inspiration from death doulas who use songs to create safe spaces for letting go, we hummed along to hospice human exceptionalism and confront our fears of insignificance.