A Pickled Community: Fermented Notes from ROT GARDEN

Abstract

Installing his work table and a photocopier in Sara Manente’s ROT GARDEN (BUDA Kortrijk, 10-13 June 2021), Jeroen Peeters proposed to ‘ferment’ a publication in and on this very environment. How to approach writing as part of an ecosystem and material process? The emerging states of the publication were printed on a daily basis and presented in public readings, with reflections on fermentation, ecology, aesthetics and the arts of ‘not-writing’, an exploration that was quite literally to be taken with ‘a pinch of salt’. This was followed by the printing of zines in a run equal to the amount of people present. Writer and text, readers and listeners were all part of the same environment, eager to engage in conversation and practise cultural rewilding. It was an experiment in local publishing that revolved around a constantly transforming and distributed ‘text’, unfurling in an unstable and irreversible process. Two years later, Peeters revisited the materials, reflected on the process and produced a fifth state as a contribution to ROT. What was this ‘pickled community’ meaning to preserve for the future?