Generational Weight features a series of sculptures, installations, and embroideries dating from January to September, 2021. The show, presented in a brick-domed space in the belly of Vienna, was itself a space for transformation, digestion, and growth. Large tanks of fermenting tea growing skins of bacterial cellulose were installed alongside and in tandem with large-scale crochet works, as well as with smaller, more delicate embroideries. The works bring together LoCascio’s research on the capability of memory to be inherited genetically, how those memories can be physiologically stored in and released from the body, how craft practices can function as somatic therapeutic techniques, and the ethics of interpersonal and interspecies care.

In “Passenger II” and “Passenger III”, LoCascio featured in-situ tanks with hundreds of liters of fermenting tea, the live processes serving as proxies for the artist’s body, and as sites a for transformation, growth, and rebirth. The product of these fermentations is a bio-film of symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast—also known as SCOBYs or bacterial cellulose—which grow skin-like on the surface of the tanks: evidence of billions of organisms metabolizing the sugar and minerals of the tea, composting something that has been left to decay into something that is effervescent, alive, and nutritious.

The title sculpture “Generational Weight”, and its sister piece “It’s Not an Accident”, feature textiles crocheted with a twisted, two-ply, unbleached, organic cotton cord of European origin cascading from armatures of salvaged barn beams and industrial steel mesh. Their crochet pattern follows an algorithm of geometric oscillations in stitch length as a meditation on how memory might be inherited genetically, and the consequences of one human’s life on the generations that follow. How have our ancestors’ unknown/unknowable and complex physical and psychological landscapes affected the shape of our lives? 

The resulting wave-like pattern of the dense, twisted stitches echoes the undulating structures and vast information contained in the human genome. These fluid and vulnerable waves can be measured against one another through the metric of the backing grid — a reference to both man‘s limited experience of time as linear, and the rigid, rusting systems he‘s imposed on natural phenomena. Meanwhile, the cord evokes both the DNA of the artist and the legacy of capitalistic expansion and predatory politics encoded in the histories of every European family.

Further explorations of these geometries and materials can be found in the embroideries featuring a base textile of dried bacterial cellulose on rough cotton gauze. In “Sink In”, the uneven rise and fall of each line of consecutive stitches build on the previous line creating unexpected, coincidental intersections of crests and troughs and areas of contraction and expansion. The stitch pattern reverses and the waves are just-visible under the skin of the semi-transparent bacterial cellulose.

In what was conceived as the final piece of the presentation, “Adrift (Vertices of the Dead)”. Composed on-site, this work presents the viewer with the end of the cycle — the resting body, perhaps finished with its transformation and cycles, yet still connected to the woven and braided umbilicals of memory.

A collection of writings on the show was featured in a small booklet published for the occasion, including the main exhibition text by Klaus Speidel. A video work, “Processing” also from 2021, documents the repetitive, somatic processes and techniques featured in the show, and features a bacterial cellulose sheet harvest. Finally, the exhibition featured a sound composition by Mala Herba, composed of LoCascio’s research voice notes and recordings made in her studio from growing and dried bacterial cellulose.