Milk is a primal substance. The first fluid to enter our mouths, it is essential to life from the very beginning. Indeed, the ‘milk of human kindness’ is fundamental to our existence as social animals. The land that flowed with milk and honey, in pre-Modern times, was imagined as a bountiful pasture that became the model for a life fulfilled. Today, however, milk is an endlessly adaptable commodity, industrially produced in unimaginably vast quantities and re-formulated for every kind of flow that global consumerism demands. In an age dominated by a form of capital that despises ‘dependence’ yet thrives on ‘precarity’, our relation to milk embodies the contradictions of our times. One of the most technologized liquids on the planet, abstracted from its nurturing function, milk is at once a symbol of the bucolic and of the exploitation of nature. In order to produce cows’ milk for humans, the seasonal cycle related to gestation has been extended into the endless time of ever-increasing milk yields. This is the temporality of the market, of production and circulation. The mass industrialisation of milk also represents an abstraction from the female body, and thus its transformation into a de-gendered industrial commodity.

Artist, Melanie Jackson, and writer, Esther Leslie, have collaborated on a series of projects, including two recent publications The Urpflanze and The Ur-phenomenon and an article for Cabinet magazine, Journeys of Lactic Abstraction. They are currently exploring the notion of liquidity, in the form of milk.

The Atlantic Dialogues are a series of public talks and interdisciplinary discussions, organized jointly by the Atlantic Project and Plymouth University Fine Art. All talks arefree and open to students and the general public, held at 4pm in the Jill Craigie Lecture Theatre, Roland Levinsky Building, University of Plymouth [unless otherwise stated].