In May last year a few of us got together to explore making Winogradsky Columns in a workshop orgainsed by the Bioart Society here in Helsinki. Our mud and water source was the south east shore of Töölölahti, the Baltic bay that scoops out a large mass of central Helsinki. I made two columns which, unsurprisingly have looked pretty dormant for the most part, their microbial consortia taking their own bacterial time to sort themselves into their metabolic, spatial arrangements inside the containers and to respond to the window environment of my home. Today in the spring sunshine I couldn’t help but notice their verdant vibrancy and almost audible intensity, as if they were in synpathy with the palpable surge of ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ beneath the ice and snow.
