Uncontainable Life : A Biophilosophy of Bioart

Radomska, Marietta

doi:10.3384/diss.diva-126670

Cited by 25 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 71 publications

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“…In other words, thinking with Douglas, flies' remains (symbolically here, but perhaps materially in a different lab depending on the model organism and the nature of the experiments) have the 'power to contaminate and to disrupt order ' (1966, 127), not because they are dead hazardous matter but because even in death they remain agential. These remains are what Radomska (2016) refers to as non/living, blurring the boundaries between life and death, which is essential to categorisation of waste in the waste guidelines in the lab. To sum up, thinking with biological waste in the lab suggests other ways of theorising ecology, namely queer ecologies of death that escape the boundaries of im/purity, in/ appropriate affinities and non/living.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Not only do the living animals and organisms need to be treated carefully so as not to bridge the laboratory environment and nature, but dead matter also has to be contained properly. As I argue in this article, thinking together with other queer death studies scholars such as Marietta Radomska (2016), dead matter is agential, it fosters life (e.g. bacteria) and as such it blurs the socially constructed boundary between life and death.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

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Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens

Mehrabi

2020

Australian Feminist Studies

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In this article I explore human and transgenic fruit fly relations in the laboratory and in relation to everyday practices of waste management. I rely on ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer's laboratory in Sweden, in which scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Grounding myself within new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about 'purity' and 'pure Nature' shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. However, as I present, the materiality of the living and dead matter problematises such fantasies of purity and pre-described categories of laboratory waste. Flies' bodies, living and nonliving, cross the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and unnatural/artificial, safe and hazardous waste, and life and death, creating queer ecologies of death. Queer ecologies of death suggest new modes of thinking about agency, (non)human and (non)living within the context of laboratory waste management that go beyond the limits of human exceptionalism and modernist hierarchical binary logic that is essential to and constitutive of the notion of purity and the imaginary of a pure nature out there.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 80%

Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens

Mehrabi

2020

Australian Feminist Studies

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“…In order to challenge the normativity and human exceptionalism of the understanding of death in Western philosophy, in her analysis of Svenja Kratz's bioartworks, Radomska employs a queerfeminist biophilosophy as an analytical lens that enables her to rethink death in terms of processes rather than essence. Using the concepts of the non/living (Radomska 2016) and passive vitalism (Colebrook 2014b), Radomska argues that 'intimacies between materialities of a human and a nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying […] consequently, reframe the ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living'.…”

Section: Queering Ontologies Of Deathmentioning

confidence: 99%

Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective

Radomska

Mehrabi

Lykke

2020

Australian Feminist Studies

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This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socioeconomic , political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.

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“…Figure 1 shows two other failed instances of the artwork: fungal contamination of the kimono-shaped jacket grown at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2010 and a mysterious jacket 'melt-down' at the Casino Luxembourg. These situations are prominently featured in the artists' communication of their piece [62,63], particularly in their references to biological entities' penchant to evade the attempted control of life in the lab.…”

Section: Oron Catts and Ionat Zurrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living Machines: Metaphors We Live By

Vaage

2019

Nanoethics

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Within biology and in society, living creatures have long been described using metaphors of machinery and computation: 'bioengineering', 'genes as code' or 'biological chassis'. This paper builds on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) argument that such language mechanisms shape how we understand the world. I argue that the living machines metaphor builds upon a certain perception of life entailing an idea of radical human control of the living world, looking back at the historical preconditions for this metaphor. I discuss how design is perceived to enable us to shape natural beings to our will, and consider ethical, epistemological and ontological implications of the prevalence of this metaphor, focusing on its use within synthetic biology. I argue that we urgently need counter-images to the dominant metaphor of living machines and its implied control and propose that artworks can provide such counterimages through upsetting the perception of life as controllable. This is argued through discussion of artworks by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, by Tarsh Bates and by Ai Hasegawa, which in different ways challenge mechanistic assumptions through open-ended engagement with the strangeness and messiness of life.

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Uncontainable Life : A Biophilosophy of Bioart

Cited by 25 publications

References 71 publications

Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens

Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens

Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective

Living Machines: Metaphors We Live By

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