A storm in a teacup, and other minor melodramas: Narratives of containment and excess in cultured colonies/colonial cultures

Farber presents an assemblage of artist's reflections on her recent body of work, titled cultured colonies/colonial cultures. The author focuses on ways in which these works, which are made using pigmented microbes, can be read through the lens of nineteenth-century female hysteria. In so doing, she traces parallel narratives of containment and excess, drawing an analogy between the potentially uncontainable growth patterns of micro-organisms and the nineteenth-century female hysterics' theatrical performances of "disobedient" behaviors and emotional excesses that transgressed Victorian ideals of femininity. She considers the growth patterns of microbes and the Victorian hysterics' behaviors as manifestations of "agential enactments".