Join Elsa Richardson, Ruby Tandoh and Subhadra Das to explore, through discussion and an artist film, how the gut speaks and how we communicate with it.
You will hear a range of perspectives on the art, science and history of digestion inspired by her new book ‘Rumbles, A Curious History of the Gut’.
For attendees in the building, the event will be followed by tea, coffee and book signing.
We’ll be in the Henry Wellcome Auditorium. To get there, take the stairs or the lift down to level −1. The auditorium is fitted with a hearing loop.
Booking a ticket for a free event does not guarantee you a place. You should aim to arrive 15 minutes before the event is scheduled to start to claim your place. If you do not arrive on time, your place may be given to someone on the waiting list.
This event will be live-transcribed. The captions will be displayed on a screen in-venue.
This event will have British Sign Language interpretation.
For more information, please visit our Accessibility page. If you have any queries about accessibility, please email us at access@wellcomecollection.org or call 0 2 0. 7 6 1 1. 2 2 2 2
Subhadra Das is a writer and historian who looks at the relationship between science and society, and what those histories mean for our lives today. For nine years, she was Curator of the Science Collections at University College London, where she was also Researcher in Critical Eugenics at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation. Her research centres around critical approaches to the history of science, particularly race science and eugenics, along with the history of museums, particularly the colonial history of natural history museums. She has written and presented podcasts, curated museum exhibitions, done stand-up comedy and regularly appears on radio and television.
Elsa Richardson is an academic at the University of Strathclyde. She holds a Chancellor’s Fellowship in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. In addition to lecturing in the history of medicine and her own research, she also curates arts and science events for public institutions, including Wellcome Collection. In 2018 she was named one of ten New Generation Thinkers by BBC Radio 3, BBC Arts, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Ruby Tandoh is a writer and author who has worked with the New Yorker, Vittles, the Guardian, Tate and more. In her work she writes about the intersections of food, art, culture and memory, and has a particular interest in how different kinds of media guide us towards new ways of eating. She's currently writing a book about how cultural forces shape our modern appetites, from cookbooks to travel and virality online.
Jenna Sutela will be joining the event remotely. She is a Finnish artist based in Berlin. She and her studio work with biological and computational systems, including the human microbiome and artificial neural networks to create sculptures, images and music. Sutela’s work has been presented at museums and in art contexts internationally, including Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024) and the Swiss Institute, New York (2023). She was a Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) in 2019–21.
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