Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art

Abstract

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art-in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice (2008-2011) by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz-challenges the normative and humanexceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of 'essences', the article examines the ways Kratz's works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living.

Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: A Biophilosophy of Non/Living Arts

“…Building on my previous work concerned with queered and ecological framings of death exposed through contemporary practices of art/science and bioart 5 (e.g., Radomska, 2020), in this paper, I focus on how artistic engagements with more-than-human death are often accompanied by (implicit) visualat times even multisensorial-and affective explorations of grief and mourning the more-than-human.…”

“…The question of presence comes in a different way in the work of Australian new-media artist Svenja Kratz, who has worked to a great extent with tissue engineering in the context of art-science practices and bioart. Relations between life and death, the AOA involves the use of different media: from the Saos-2 cell line and other biomatter, through photography and video, to sculpture and installation (Kratz, 2012;Radomska, 2020). Each exhibition-reminiscent of a peculiar "wonderland"-creates a space where different non/living elements and objects enter into relations with one another, simultaneously exposing the life/ death and presence/absence entanglements.…”

Non/Living Queerings, Undoing Certainties, and Braiding Vulnerabilities: A Collective Reflection

“…The machine keeps on 'jamming', while manufacturing grievable and non-grievable lives and deaths (cf. Radomska 2020). Although the concept rightly captures the anthropological machinery, Agamben remains blind to the crucial factors/power differentials that are key in the functioning of the machine: race, gender, class, sexuality, age and species are absent from his argument.…”

Fathoming postnatural oceans: Towards a low trophic theory in the practices of feminist posthumanities

“…Our proposal for low-trophic theory is inscribed in this ‘minor’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) tradition of theorising surrounding the questions of consumption. Yet, in the context of human cultures, consumption – in both its narrow sense of food and broader understanding of consuming the world in its every aspect (Catts and Zurr, 2013; Radomska, 2017, 2020) – is not only about nourishment and material survival. It also amplifies and is amplified by one’s identity, belonging, culture, belief and habit, among others.…”

“…It concerns entangled bodily materialities as much as temporal scales, ranging from deep pasts to deep futures. Typical life processes unfold cyclically, with organisms living and dying, returning to particles that are reabsorbed by bacteria and other microfauna, and ultimately transformed into new life (Radomska, 2020). Drawing upon James Hatley’s concept of ‘aenocide,’ Deborah Bird Rose looks at the Anthropocenic conditions whereby these life-death processes are amplified and where the balance between ‘living’ and ‘dying’ is tipped, and names it ‘double death.’ When these amplify further – such that the death of individuals threatens the future existence of a species or of multiple species – we have what Rose, together with Hatley, identifies as ‘ecological aenocide, or the multispecies “murder of ethical time”’ (Rose, 2012: 128).…”