More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: Bioart Page 1 of 2

Human-Yeast Interrelations: Publication & Exhibit

by Olga Timurgalieva, Patrícia Moreira, and Eva Direito

The art book, Yeasts as We Do Not Know Them, chronicles the roles of single-celled fungal microbes, mainly yeasts, in human lives. The art project, co-produced by designer Eva Direito, biotechnologist Patricia Moreira, and art researcher Olga Timurgalieva, traces the ways these single-celled fungal microbes are involved in producing food and beverage, medicine, animal feed, textile detergents, pigments, biofuels, and other products. 

Pages 20 and 21 of the book, Yeasts As We Do Not Know Them, related to yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, used to produce sugar substitute xylitol, 2022. ©Eva Direito, Patricia Moreira, Olga Timurgalieva.

Nowadays, in the abundance of industrially manufactured products, we are often unaware of how and from which materials some specific things are made. However, in light of climate change and increasing pollution in the atmosphere, we are called upon to learn about “the substances that surround us, those for which we may be somewhat responsible, those that may harm us, those that may harm others, and those that we suspect we do not know enough about” (Alaimo, 2010, p. 18). The art book, Yeasts as We Do Not Know Them, therefore, maps some of the human-yeast interrelations and invites the audiences to learn about the materials produced with the application of yeasts.  

Pages 38 and 39 of the book, Yeasts As We Do Not Know Them, related to Saccharomyces cerevisiae used in bioethanol production, 2022. ©Eva Direito, Patricia Moreira, Olga Timurgalieva.
Pages 10 and 11 of the book, Yeasts As We Do Not Know Them, related to yeast, Pichia pastoris, studied to develop vaccines against Human papillomavirus infection, 2022. ©Eva Direito, Patricia Moreira, Olga Timurgalieva.

The book’s concept emerged under the influence of the 2021-22 PhD course “Gender and Sustainability – Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities” (FAD3115) collaboratively delivered by the School of Architecture and the Built Environment of KTH Royal Institute of Technology and the Posthumanities Hub. The course focused on post-disciplinary approaches to sustainability and incorporated diverse critical and creative perspectives from environmental humanities. 

Inspired by the practices at the intersection of feminist theories and sustainability presented during the course, we conceived the book as practice-oriented research. The cross-disciplinary collective work has allowed us to dive into the diversity of human-yeast interspecies relations and to convert our leanings into the tangible form of the book. 

We were lucky to have exhibited the prototype of the book in Hong Kong and Portugal. In Hong Kong, the book was featured as a part of the exhibition, Nexus between Art, Practice & Researchat the gallery Floating Projects at Jockey Club Creative Art Centre. Later, on 17 September 2022, we presented the project on the campus of the Catholic University of Portugal in Porto as part of the celebration of International Microorganism Day. The celebration event was co-organized with the Federation of European Microbiology Societies (FEMS). The event gathered more than 500 students and highlighted numerous crucial roles that microbes play in nature and their relation to human society.

Yeasts As We Do Not Know Them at the exhibition, Nexus between Art, Practice & Research, Floating Projects, Jockey Club Creative Art Centre, Hong Kong, 14-31 July 2022. Exhibition view. Photo Credit: Kay Mei Ling Beadman.

The art book, Yeasts as We Do Not Know Them, has been produced with financial support by Portuguese National Funds from FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology through the Strategic Projects CITAR (Research Centre in Science and Technology of the Arts) [grant number UID/EAT/0622/2016].

Featured Image: Pages 12 and 13 of the book, Yeasts As We Do Not Know Them, include images, Bear in mind that bread made from Magic Yeast will cure indigestion: get the entire menagerie. Presumably, 1880-1890. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark Link: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/mu8gcrx7

References:

Alaimo, S. (2010). Bodily natures: Science, environment, and the material self. Indiana University Press.

Eva Direito holds a degree in Art Conservation and is currently doing her master’s degree in Conservation of New Media Art at the School of Arts (UCP, Portugal). Having received an artistic education, Eva works with digital and analog photography and graphic design. During the past few years, she’s been working as Art Director in short movies for the School of Arts, some of which had been nominated for prizes (“Our House in Flames” by Miguel Mesquita, at Curtas Festival of Vila do Conde, Portugal) and others had won awards, such as “Hysteria” by Luísa Campino, at Sophia Awards, Portugal. 

Patrícia Moreira holds a PhD in Biotechnology with a specialization in Biochemical Engineering from the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP, Portugal). She is an Assistant Professor at the School of Arts (UCP). She is an integrated member of the Center for Research in Science and Technology of the Arts (CITAR), coordinator of the Area-Focus Heritage, Conservation, and Restoration of CITAR, and collaborator of the Center for Biotechnology and Fine Chemistry (UCP). Her main research area is innovation in Biotechnology for Cultural Heritage, with emphasis on biodeterioration, sustainability, citizen science Green Conservation, and bio-art practices. 

Olga Timurgalieva is a PhD candidate at City University of Hong Kong and a former visiting researcher at King’s College London. Awarded by the Hong Kong PhD Fellowship Scheme, her research investigates the intersections of contemporary art, microbiology, and ecocriticism, with a particular focus on fungal microbes and their interspecies relations. Olga has worked in art institutions, including V-A-C Foundation (Moscow) and the ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe), and co-curated the exhibition, “Here and Elsewhere,” at the Kobro Gallery, The Strzemiński Academy of Art (Lodz) and the festival, “Seasons of Media Arts 2019,” at the ZKM. 

ANIMA MUNDI – requiem for a vanishing

Invitation, dears.

ANIMA MUNDI is a 4-channel video installation and performance by gustaf broms BENHUSET (The Bone House), Stockholm March 11–27, 2022 12:00–20:00 daily. 

“Being in a time and place, where identification with the thin membrane of skin, as container of self, is slowly dissolving, as borders between beings evaporate, the environment disintegrates into a myriad of sentient beings.” ~gustaf broms  

The project ANIMA MUNDI grew out of a series of actions in the forest in Vendel, Sweden. These meetings of organic bodies create a dialogue between species that weaves a story without words. These filmed interactions become the material for a 4-channel video in a room somewhere between installation, sound, performance and video, in which the artist makes an 18-day action as a dialogue with moving image.   The working title ANIMA MUNDI usually translates as ‘world soul.’ In Timaeus, Plato wrote “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence……a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.”

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘Arts of Non/Living Matters’, 17 June, 13:15-15:00 on Zoom

Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘Arts of Non/Living Matters’ with Margherita Pevere and Dr Marietta Radomska!

The seminar is combined with the launch of the new research group and platform: The Eco- and Bioart Lab (EBL).

EBL, founded and head by Dr Marietta Radomska, connects artists, artistic researchers and other practitioners, as well as doctoral students whose practice and research focus on art and the environment in their broadest understanding.

When: 17th June 2021, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST

Where: On Zoom (more info below)

Image used on the poster:
Margherita Pevere, Wombs | Study. pencil on colour print 27×18 cm, 2018.

REGISTRATION: In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 16th June 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.

The Zoom link will be sent to you on 16th June in the evening.

Speakers:

Leaking. Mattering.

By Margherita Pevere

Abstract

Drawing from her transdisciplinary practice, Margherita Pevere will recount how the non/living is an ongoing, uncontainable encounter made of leaks and unlearning.

She will do so by sharing the research behind her recent and previous artworks. She will talk about what it means to interrogate slugs and hormonal contraception as she did for the series ‘Wombs’. She will share very real and potential leaks encountered during the realisation of ‘Semina Aeternitatis’. She will delve into the body entanglements in ‘Eingeweide’, made in collaboration with artist Marco Donnarumma. She will recount how she worked with animal remains in ‘Lymph’.

While celebrating art, Margherita’s talk will weave a dialogue across non/living encounters with ecosystems as a fundamental epistemic mode. In fact, her artworks would exist without learning why the lagoon water gets transparent, observing algal blooms in urban waterways, or engaging with hybrid kinships of different kinds. Art and ecological observation are, in her practice, conjoined strategies of knowing differently. 

Bio

A truly transdisciplinary practitioner, Margherita Pevere works across bioart and performance with a visceral signature. Her arresting creations hunt today’s surging ecological complexity and the ways embodiment and environment are always entangled. To do so, her research hybridises biolab practice, ecology, queer and death studies with a hacking attitude. She has exhibited her work internationally and is now completing a PhD in artistic research at Aalto University on bioart and queer theory.
https://margheritapevere.com
https://frontevacuo.com

Contact: margherita.pevere[at]aalto.fi

Ecologies of the Non/Living: A Queerfeminist Biophilosophical Perspective

By Marietta Radomska

Abstract

The concept of ‘the non/living’ (Radomska 2016) stems from a transdisciplinary theoretical and practical engagement with bioart, bioscience, and philosophical approaches to life. The non/living reframes what is conventionally referred to as ‘life’ in order to problematise the materiality, processuality and ambiguity of the relationship between the living and non-living, growth and decay, and ultimately, life and death. This ambivalent entwinement comes to the fore even more so when considered against the backdrop of the planetary environmental disruption and other intersecting more-than-human crises of our times.

Drawing on process, queer and feminist philosophical perspectives as well as several select examples of contemporary bio-, eco- and media artworks, I will offer a queerfeminist biophilosophy as an approach that may allow us to better comprehend the complexity, vibrancy and materiality of the non/living. The latter, always-already understood as ‘ecologies of non/living matters’, calls for not only an ontological reflection, but also for an ethical one.

Bio

Marietta Radomska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities at Linköping University (Unit Gender Studies); director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab; co-director of The Posthumanities Hub; and co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network. She works at the intersection of the posthumanities, environmental humanities, continental philosophy, feminist theory, queer death studies, visual culture and contemporary art; and has published in Australian Feminist Studies; Somatechnics; Women, Gender & Research and Artnodes, among others. Web: www.mariettaradomska.com

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘Queer Death Aesthetics’, 27th May at 13:15 – 15:00 on Zoom.

Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on Queer Death Aesthetics with speakers: Karolina Żyniewicz (University of Warsaw) and Jacob B. Riis (Aarhus University)!

Queer Death Studies (QDS) is an emerging transdisciplinary field that critically investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding the issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. In particular, QDS pays attention to the ways planetary-scale necropolitics render some lives and deaths more recognised, understood or grievable than others.  If ‘queering’ in QDS is understood in a broad, open-ended sense as strange-making, defamiliarising, where the critical defamiliarisation implied may lead to an opening of other, more affirmative horizons, what would then ‘queer death aesthetics’ mean? During the seminar we will try to tackle this question in depth…

The event is curated by Dr Marietta Radomska and is organised in collaboration with The Eco- and Bioart Lab.

When: 27th May 2021, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST

Where: On Zoom

REGISTRATION: In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 25th May 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.

The Zoom link will be sent to you on 26th May.

More info below.

Photos included in the poster: Portrait of Karolina Żyniewicz by Pawel Jozwiak (CSW Laznia, Gdansk; LEFT) and Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991, by Felix Gonzalez-Torres (RIGHT).

Speakers:

Safe suicide – becoming immortal and dying anyway.

By Karolina Żyniewicz

How to experience immortal life and death at the same time? How to do it safely, without a risk? Are cells isolated from my body still part of me? These were the main questions which I asked to myself and to my scientific collaborators in the beginning of working on safe suicide project. The project was transmattering on many different levels, a transformation of the body and its notion, understanding of life and death coalition, cognitive production, artistic expression. In the frame of the project I immortalised my cells, B lymphocytes just in order to decide about their death. Technically speaking, it was giving to them/myself immortality to take it back in many different experiments. It was being a donor, an observer, a caretaker and a killer at the same time. The project does not give precise answers for the posted questions but it allows to envision what means being liminal, being many and being constantly reconfigured.

Bio

Karolina Żyniewicz is an artist (2009 graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Department of Visual Arts) and researcher, PhD student (Nature-Culture Transdisciplinary PhD Program at Artes Liberales Faculty, University of Warsaw). Working in a laboratory (mostly at the Institute of Genetics and Biotechnology, Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw) locates her works in the field of bio art, although she tries to avoid using this term.

Are we dead yet?

By Jacob B. Riis

One of the defining characteristics in human behavioural modernity is burial of the dead in conjunction with ritual and art – art’s primordial love affair is with putrefying corpses. This project outlines a genre that utilises material corpses to produce contemporary art pieces. I currently conceptualise this art form as Necro Art, which serves to connect it to Mbembian inspired Necro Aesthetics and simultaneously establish it as its own field or genre within Art History. While perhaps being a version of Body Art originating in Viennese Actionism, Necro Art simultaneously aligns along different trajectories. It samples and shuffles in early human ritual, folkloric, pagan and rural art forms usually not present in realms of High/Academic Art, and brings the overlooked, the spectral, the magical, and the illiterate too Art History. Through focus on materiality, agency and constellations of subjectivities, each artwork conjures ghosts, reveals life where there is none, and allows its experiencer to connect with the dead, forcing us to reconsider the boundaries of life.

Bio

Jacob B. Riis, Art historian (graduated from Copenhagen University in 2014), 2009-2014 Curator Assistant at The Danish Museum of National History, Hillerød, 2014-2018 Head of Teaching and Curator at Ordrupgaard in Copenhagen, currently PhD student at Art History, Aarhus University.

“(Bio)art & ecologies of non/living matters: A conversation between visual artist Emanuela Cusin and philosopher Marietta Radomska.” An event at the University of Birmingham

Join us for this fantastic even organised by the ERC project ‘Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence’.

Location: Online

Date: Thursday 15 April 2021, 14:00-16:15 GMT / 15:00-17:15 CET

Contact: e.m.l.geerts@bham.ac.uk

REGISTRATION

Official event website

Introduction

During this research seminar, visual artist Emanuela Cusin (Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (UK)) and philosopher Dr Marietta Radomska (Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities, Linköping University (SE)) will present their artistic and philosophical engagements with the matter(s)—and materialisation—of (bio)art and ecologies of the non/living. They will do so against the backdrop of these more-than-human crisis times that are afflicted by political and pandemic violence, (counter)terrorist acts and events, and processes of mourning, trauma, and commemoration. Special attention will be paid to new materialist, posthumanist, and affect theoretical strands of thought and artistic practice that can help us better understand these complex times, while emphasising the importance of such novel modes of thought and practice that take into account a shared multispecies vulnerability. 

Programme

14.00 Welcome and introduction of the speakers by Dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham) and general introduction of the Urban Terrorism project by Dr Katharina Karcher (University of Birmingham).

14.10 Presentation on the artwork Breaking Point by Emanuela Cousin.

14.40 Presentation by Dr Marietta Radomska on “Death, Ecology, Affect: Towards and Ethics of Non/Living Matters.” 

15.10 Short break.

15.20 Conversation between the speakers (with questions from the audience).

16.10 Final remarks.

The event will be recorded and uploaded with subtitles later on. If you have any specific accessibility requirements do let us know upon registering.

Speaker Biographies

Emanuela Cusin

A portrait of Emanuela CusinEmanuela Cusin (www.emanuelacusin.com) is a visual artist working with different mediums, methodologies, and themes. She is based at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (UK).

Cusin’s current projects focus on the concept of uprootedness and themes of movement and inertia, vulnerability and resistance, and aim to create a safe space for confrontation and recovery, for herself, the audience and others involved. Her work has been selected for events/pop-up exhibitions and educational projects at the Sainsbury Arts Centre; Tate Modern; Wysing Arts Centre; British Art Show 8, and Firstsite. Since 2016 she has been collaborating with Dr Katharina Karcher on various projects in Cambridge and Birmingham that have been designed to initiate new networks between artists, researchers and citizens on themes of surveillance, solidarity, and anti-authoritarian politics. Cusin is also part of SciArt Cambridge, a growing grassroots community of artists and scientists that aims to build accessible, friendly and open-minded platforms in order to foster and promote collaborations between artists and scientists.

During her presentation, Cusin will talk about her artwork Breaking Point, how this work came into being and has evolved thus far, and where/how she would like it to keep evolving and transforming.

Marietta Radomska

A portrait of Marietta RadomskaMarietta Radomska, PhD (www.mariettaradomska.com) is a Research Fellow in Environmental Humanities at Linköping University (Unit Gender Studies), SE; co-director of The Posthumanities Hub; founder of The Eco- and Bioart Research Network; and co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network.

Radomska is a philosopher and transdisciplinary gender studies scholar, and her work resides at the intersection of posthumanities, environmental humanities, philosophy, queer death studies, visual culture and contemporary art.  She is the author of Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016) and has published in Australian Feminist StudiesSomatechnicsWomen, Gender & Research, and Artnodes, among others.

During her presentation, Radomska will focus on the following: What articulations, cultural and social imaginaries, as well as imaginations are needed in the times of multiple crises? Where do we start when the notions of death and vulnerability seem to saturate any attempt to comprehend the conditions of the present? Taking the intersection between contemporary artistic practices and feminist posthumanities as her entry point, Radomska will look at the questions of death, dying and mourning in a more-than-human sense and as multiplex ecologies of non/living matters. The hope is that such an ontological reframing, grounded in the context of what some tend to call ‘the Anthropocene’, may open up an urgently needed pathway towards an ethics beyond the straitjacket of human exceptionalism.

The event is funded by the ERC project ‘Urban Terrorism in Europe (2004-19): Remembering, Imagining, and Anticipating Violence’.

Page 1 of 2

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén