30:53, audio documentary, DiSCo Journal, SOAS, Fall 2025
What is mycelial time? How do we build a movement at the speed of mycelium?
How To Grow A Movement is a living thought fermentation on catalytic impulse, relational transformation, and mycelial time with social movement thinkers and doers. Inspired by the science and sound of the sugar fungus, this sound ethnography explores the notion of Critical Yeast, a term coined by peacebuilding practitioner and scholar John Paul Lederach. As an alternative to critical mass, Critical Yeast refers to the catalytic coming together of a group of individuals who are not like-minded or like-situated, and can transform in a context of conflict.
Based on conversations and participant-observations of baking and fermentation experiments, this sound essay ascertains the who and how related to social movements and interspecies relationships. With location recordings, original music, and sound design, this sound work inquires into the quiet transmutability and multigenerational temporality of fermentation. It is an evocation of movement minutiae and wisdom toward a better more-than-human world.
Included in HOWL, a group exhibition curated by Ashton Philips for Human Resources LA in September 17 – 22, 2025, the installation Rest / Unrest features amplified sound from living yeast from sourdough starter and presents the How To Grow A Movement audio ethnography for a gallery audience.
Listen + read on DISCo Journal
Credits
How To Grow A Movement was written, mixed, and engineered by Umi Hsu. Music composed by Umi Hsu.
It features voices of:
Marcus Benigno
traci kato-kiriyama
Audrey Kuo
Kwanda Scott
Arden Stern
Aaron Tupac
Grace Umali
Jess Wang
Kenneth Yates
Special thanks to Denny Greene, Ashton Philips, April Wei-West, SOAS University of London, and CHASE Consortium.
Published in DiSCo Journal, issue 2, 2025.
Works Cited
Brown, Adrienne M. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press.
Lederach, John P. 2005. “On Mass and Movement: The Theory of Critical Yeast”, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace. New York: Oxford University Press.
Money, Nicholas P. 2018. The Rise of Yeast: How the Sugar Fungus Shaped Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.