Spirillum, a spiral-shaped bacterium found in soil and freshwater, moves and adapts at scales largely imperceptible to the human eye. This corkscrew-shaped organism was first observed by Victorian polymath Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) in his 1878 paper entitled On the Life-History of Spirillum. "They were... constantly in motion" he wrote, "...progressing with a strange, unsteady forward movement... like inter-twinging snakes convoluting into loops, knots, and spirals."

Trained as a biologist, Geddes developed ideas that would quietly underpin much of early twentieth-century ecological and systems-based thinking. His early biological research, particularly his work on symbiosis, challenged dominant evolutionary models of individuality by emphasizing cooperation over competition, and process over stasis. These insights would later crystallize into his theory of "reciprocal accommodation," a principle of symbiotic coevolution he applied across scales, from microbial ecologies to human cities, cultures, and civilizations. For Geddes, life was never a collection of discrete entities but an ongoing process of relation, guided by his philosophy of "sympathy, synthesis, and synergy." He insisted that knowledge must be felt, practiced, and lived, not merely observed or abstracted.

On the Life-History of Spirillum takes its name from Geddes’ original publication, drawing from the language andvisual culture of early microbiology to re-consider how the scientific gaze shapes what is seen, named, and rendered knowable. The artists presented–Elif Cadoux, Lucía Cozzi, weather citizen x caitlin c. harvey, Maya Davis, Taeyoon Choi, Natasha Viosna Moody, Sam Seurynck Griffith, and Daniel Sharp–linger at the edge of the scientific gaze, where observation falters and certainty dissolves. Works assembled here imagine microscopic life not as passive matter under scrutiny, but as an active, organizing force: one that reshapes environments, modulates bodies, and unsettles distinctions between species, systems, and forms of knowledge. In doing so, the exhibition re-centers the invisible and the not-yet-knowable, foregrounding modes of understanding that exceed the limits of human vision.

The exhibition’s conceptual framework is guided by the bacterium and Geddes, whose contributions to biology, sociology, education, and urban studies have long been undervalued and fragmented by disciplinary histories. Crucially, Geddes was a central intellectual force within the Celtic Revival in Scotland at the end of the 19th century and the industrial age; a cultural movement that sought not to romanticize the past but to reactivate it as a resource for collective futures. Alongside folklorists, artists, and writers, Geddes understood cultural renewal as a radical practice (radicalis, to form the root) grounded in place, community, and historical continuity. The revival’s emphasis on oral tradition, seasonal rhythms, and the interdependence of culture and environment resonates strongly with the ethos of Imbolc, both historically and as it is reimagined today. In this sense, On the Life-History of Spirillum situates itself within a longer lineage of Celtic cultural imagination; one that extends from Victorian Scotland to contemporary Detroit, adapting shared tenets of collectivity, ecological attunement, and world-making to new social and environmental contexts.

This sensibility finds contemporary resonance in theories of embodiment and embodied ecologies, which understand cognition and perception as inseparable from bodily experience and environmental context. From phenomenological accounts of perception as an active and inactive process to post-human feminist approaches that trouble the borders of the human body itself, these frameworks insist that bodies are porous, situated, and relational. As thinkers such as cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis remind us, we are not separate from the waters, microbes, atmospheres, and infrastructures that sustain us; we are ethically and materially entangled within them. The body, in this view, is not a boundary but a threshold.

On the Life-History of Spirillum extends this threshold logic beyond the visual, asking what it might mean to attend to life through senses and registers that operate outside language or representation. Through sculpture, moving image, sound, and experimental archival approaches, the artists spiral outward from the life-history of Spirillum, treating it as a speculative narrative that unfolds across material, temporal, and bodily registers. Sound, vibration, movement, rhythm, and duration emerge as crucial modes of relation, proposing forms of interspecies communication that do not rely on translation into human terms. Microbial networks are placed in dialogue with social, political, and environmental systems, revealing shared logics of circulation, contamination, care, and interdependence. These works do not seek to resolve complexity but to remain with it, emphasizing relation over resolution and process over product.

Situated within the temporal horizon of Imbolc, a festival marking seasonal transition, emergence, and latent growth, the exhibition aligns itself with a cosmology attentive to what unfolds beneath the surface. Imbolc marks neither an end nor a beginning, but a turning: a moment when life stirs invisibly within soil, water, and body. In this context, the microbial becomes emblematic rather than incidental, foregrounding regeneration as a quiet, accumulative process that begins at scales beyond perception. By attending to these overlooked agents, the exhibition asks how understandings of scale, care, and coexistence might shift when we no longer imagine ourselves as bounded individuals, but as environments; hosts, habitats, and collaborators within complex ecological assemblages. Like Spirillum itself, the exhibition moves by circling rather than advancing, proposing survival not as mastery or extraction, but as the ongoing capacity to remain in relation.