Dr Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist-researcher working through creative practices to explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, microbial and otherwise) can be a way to recover climate heritages in ways that open up new speculations on how we might live in the future. Utilising a practice they call 'multispecies co-creation' (Modi, 2024) Kaajal incorporates listening, fermenting, cooking, storytelling and performative encounters to create lively and situated interactions between people, organisms and ecosystems. Their practice-based PhD, Kitchen Cultures (2019–2024) explored food fermentation in collaboration Global Majority women in their own kitchens over the COVID-19 lockdown as a negotiation of multispecies ontological politics through digital and postdigital practices of metabolic intimacy.
Kaajal is presently a Postdoctoral Researcher in Anthropocene Encounters at Heritage for Global Challenges at the University of York. Their research at the centre explores multispecies encounters in the kitchen, lab and landscape in order to understand how humans continuously negotiate microbial imaginaries through food, medicine, spiritual and sensory modes, as well as poetry, song and storytelling. They are a commissioned artist on Counterpoint Arts and Art Reach’s Climate Justice and Displacement call, for which they produced Songs of the Water.
Kaajal was formerly Assistant Professor in Art History and Design at Northeastern University London, and prior to that an RA in Responsible Interactions at Newcastle University’s Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment (HBBE). At HBBE they collaborated with researchers and artists to develop modes of research and engagement through which to imagine the living cities of the future. Projects invited the public to reflect on practices of inter- and intra-species care and control as a way to open up the conversation about how we live with the micro-organisms with whom we share environments, homes, and bodies.