Hidden Third Partner: in the company of yeast
23 June 2025
Art Research Garden
Guests: Ayșe Köklü, Brandon LaBelle and Jol Thoms
In June 2025, we gathered at Art Research Garden for a relaxed afternoon in communion with "wild" local yeast. Guests Ayşe Köklü, Brandon LaBelle and Jol Thoms held space for this microscopic agent of flux in the form of a microbial meditation, a starter ceremony and ecological and speculative listening praxis, fermentation and other transformational processes such as gleaning, washing, kneading and baking.
A sourdough starter was initiated during the afternoon, with participants invited to take some home. A brief was also shared, inviting participants to cultivate a listening praxis with their yeast in the lead-up to the associated London Listening Biennale workshop in Autumn 2025.
Artist Biographies:
Ayşe Köklü is an interdisciplinary artist, researcher and educator based in London. Spanning sound recordings, text, DIY musical instruments, experimental learning events and somatic practices, her work revolves around the relationship between sound, ecology, place-making and loss. Ayşe is currently pursuing a part-time PhD in Arts&Learning Programme at Goldsmiths, developing collaborative and arts based pedagogies for and with the endangered Turkish whistled language.
Ayşe holds a BA (Hons) in Graphic Communication Design from Central Saint Martins (2013), a Graduate Diploma in Linguistics from Birkbeck (2016), and an MA in Art Practice & Learning from Goldsmiths (2020). She currently teaches on the Creative Unions programme at CSM and has previously taught on the Communication Pathway at the UAL Foundation (2022–2025). From 2015 to 2020, she designed and led a critical and creative research methods course for the CSM Study Abroad Programme.
www.aysekoklu.info
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and theorist working with sound culture, voice, listening and questions of agency. Guided by situated and collaborative methodologies, he develops artistic projects and performances within a range of international contexts, mostly working in public and with others. From gestures of intimacy and listening to critical festivity and experimental pedagogy, his practice aligns itself with a politics and poetics of radical hospitality. This leads to performative installations, poetic theater, storytelling, and research actions aimed at forms of experimental community making, as well as extra-institutional initiatives, including The Listening Biennial and Academy which he currently directs. He is also currently working as a research fellow at the National Hellenic Research Foundation for the ERC project MUTE (Soundscapes of Trauma: Music, Sound, and the Ethics of Witnessing).
https://brandonlabelle.net
Jol Thoms (b. Toronto) is an artist, sound designer, and researcher based in London, UK. His transdisciplinary fieldwork and critical audio/visual practices interrogate the West's troubled relationships with Nature, Technology, and Cosmos by signalling beyond the purely measurable and quantifiable, and by thinking, feeling, and sensing with more-than-human worlds. His compositions, lecture-performances, and educational experimentations emerge from site-based fieldwork in remote ‘landscape-laboratories’ situated at the forefront and intersection of experimental physics and environmental stewardship where cosmic and planetary bodies become entangled as vast posthuman sensing arrays. He is currently Studio Lecturer in Goldsmiths’ MA Art & Ecology and MA Art & Politics. He is also a member of the Centre for Art & Ecology.
https://jolthoms.com
The AuralPluralities Network is a CHASE research network led by and for academics, scholars and creative practitioners dedicated to addressing, and extending upon, the ‘auraldiverse turn’ in the Arts and Humanities research: theory and praxis, problematising the onto-epistemological hierarchies associated with sound and audition.
The network is a hybrid space acting as: a social hub and a professional forum; a focus for professional practice and debate, both online and in-person; an archive of past research activity; and a website with social media platform. It is structured around a theoretical framework and methodology critiquing normative and hegemonic structures within our contemporary (Western) milieu alongside its associated crises.