Category: Publications

New publication: Deterritorilising Death

It is my great pleasure to say that my latest article Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art, forming part of the special issue of Australian Feminist Studies focused on “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective”, co-edited by myself, Tara Mehrabi and Nina Lykke, has just been published online. The text is available in OPEN ACCESS.

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 human-exceptionalist 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.

KEYWORDS: queerfeminist biophilosophy, death, the non/living, Queer Death Studies, art, Svenja Kratz

“Seeding Stories: A Guide To The Interior Of A Salt Water Crocodile Project” has been launched!

“Seeding Stories: A Guide To The Interior Of A Salt Water Crocodile” artwork by The Migrant Ecologies Project finally has its own beautiful website: https://seeding-stories.org/ – check it out!

More about the project (via Seeding Stories website):

“On 10 June 2019, a single grain of wheat, part of wheat-straw stuffing of a 133-year-dead, 4.7 metres long, saltwater crocodile, shot in 1887 at the mouth of the no-longer-existing Serangoon River, Singapore and kept for over a century in the Raffles Museum, migrated to the Arctic circle and was ceremonially buried in Platåberget, adjacent to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen.

This gesture was part of an artwork by the Singapore-situated Migrant Ecologies Project. The work was selected by an international jury of artists and scientists from 100 entries from all over the world for an exhibition curated and led by Dr. Fern Wickson from the Centre for Biosafety at University of Tromsø – The Arctic University of Norway. Dr. Wickson believes that nature and human cultures are intertwined and wanted to generate a parallel initiative to remember 21st century cultural relationships with plants and seeds, next door to the world famous doomsday vault.”

AFS’s special issue on ‘Feminist Technoecologies’ is out now!

The special issue of Australian Feminist Studies focused on the topic of ‘Feminist Technoecologies’ (vol. 32, no 94) and edited by fantastic Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer, Pat Treusch and Xin Liu has just been published!

Here’s a little snippet from the introduction by the editors:

‘This special issue of Australian Feminist Studies is a collective effort to think with and through the notion of ‘feminist technoecologies’. One of the shared starting points of the contributions is that the term is not simply the conjoining, but a simultaneous reworking, of ‘technologies’ and ‘ecologies’, from various feminist perspectives. The articles provide critical responses to the contemporary challenges of environmental degradation, refugee crises and digital technologisation by asking how the boundary is drawn between the technological and the ecological, and how these distinctions are informed by implicit and explicit investments in the exceptional status of the human condition. They share the view that technology is not simply a neutral tool for management and advancement, any more than ecology is merely the environment, whose harmonious organisation becomes disturbed by human enterprises and technological interventions.’

(Lorenz-Meyer, Treusch & Xin Liu 2018: 351)

In the issue you can also find my my text ‘Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart’ – available in OPEN ACCESS here.

 

 

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