Lorena Molina

The Fermenting Archive is an on-going/in-progress body of work that uses bacteria, biomaterials, and photography to explore migration, place, archives, and kinship at the microbial level. I create photographic portraits of family and chosen kin in places where they feel safe, alongside landscapes that have shaped my understanding of home. These images are printed or cast into bioplastics made from plants, seeds, and other natural materials tied to those locations. I then collect microbes from the sites where the photographs were made such as kitchens, bedsheets, breath, skin, soil, etc and use them to create cultures that transform the images over time.

The bacteria collected from those sites mix with the microbes already present in the natural materials themselves, as well as the microbes of the place where I am making the work, creating layered archives of people, place, and memory. I am deeply interested in the ways bacteria pass knowledge across generations and carry the memory of place. This feels especially important when colonization, war, and displacement have destroyed traditional archives.

Many of my family’s photographs were lost during our forced migration from El Salvador to the United States, leaving behind visual histories that could not cross the border with us. This project is, in part, a way of rebuilding that archive. It connects the loss of those images to the ways we have kept ancestral knowledge alive across generations despite displacement.

I am also interested in bacteria as a form of protection. Photography has often been used as a tool of surveillance, classification, and extraction, especially toward marginalized communities. By allowing bacteria to grow on and transform these images, they become protected from the usual handling, touching, and consumption that photography often invites. In some ways, the bacteria act as caretakers of the people I love.
They partially obscure the image and create a layer of protection. I am interested in creating images that are not fully available to the viewer, images that maintain some agency over how they are seen, especially when working with portraiture.

The Fermenting Archive emerges in a political moment when anti-immigrant policies, increased surveillance, and violent rhetoric continue to target immigrant communities. Bacteria, like people who migrate, are often demonized. But bacteria are also life-sustaining. They cross borders freely, without passports or permission. They resist being controlled. Microbes connect us to our ancestors, our homes, and each other. They pass knowledge across generations, carry the memory of place, and teach us how to adapt, survive, and transform.

Through this work, I am interested in creating counter-archives that museums cannot collect. These works reject the polished aesthetics of institutional archives and the spectacle often demanded of marginalized bodies. Instead, the images become living sites of collaboration between my loved ones, the microbes present in the work, and the natural materials I use.

The work really insists on its own timeline. The bacteria and materials I am working with have a mind of their own, and part of the excitement is that they continue to transform the work in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. I see this project as a way of pushing back against the need for everything to be permanent, pure, and controlled.

Ultimately, The Fermenting Archive is a celebration of what survives despite displacement such as ancestral knowledge, collective care, and the memories carried by both people and microbes.