Tag: non/living

New Publication: “Non/Living Queerings, Undoing Certainties, Braiding Vulnerabilities: A Collective Reflection”

The latest issue of Artnodes: E-journal for Art, Science and Technology, focused on ‘Art in the Time of Pandemic’ and edited by Laura Benitez and Erich Berger is finally out and available in OPEN ACCESS. Inside you may also find a contribution by myself, Mayra Citllali Rojo Gómez, Margherita Pevere and Terike Haapoja, entitled: ‘Non/Living Queerings, Undoing Certainties, Braiding Vulnerabilities: A Collective Reflection’. You can read our article here.

Abstract:

The ongoing global pandemic of Covid-19 has exposed SARS-CoV-2 as a potent non-human actant that resists the joint scientific, public health and socio-political efforts to contain and understand both the virus and the illness. Yet, such a narrative appears to conceal more than it reveals. The seeming agentiality of the novel coronavirus is itself but one manifestation of the continuous destruction of biodiversity, climate change, socio-economic inequalities, neocolonialism, overconsumption and the anthropogenic degradation of nature. Furthermore, focusing on the virus – an entity that holds an ambiguous status between the ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ – brings into question the issue of the agentiality of non/living matter. While the story of viral potency seems to get centre stage, overshadowing the complex and perverse entanglement of processes and phenomena which  activated these potentials in the first place, the Covid-19 pandemic also becomes a prism that sheds light on the issues of environmental violence; social and environmental injustices; more-than-human agentiality; and ethico-political responses that the present situation may mobilise.

This article serves as a written record of joint conversations between artists and researchers in the working group ‘Non/Living Queerings’ that formed part of the online series of events ‘Braiding Friction’ organised by the research project Biofriction. The article strives to capture the collective effort of braiding and weaving a variety of situated perspectives, theoretical toolboxes, knowledges and experiences against the background of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. In particular, the text focuses on the issues of crisis, ‘amplification effect’, viral agency and the changing notions of humanity.

Keywords

the non/living, queering, Covid-19 pandemic, art, vulnerability, amplification

Reference:

Radomska, Marietta, Rojo Gómez, Mayra Citlalli, Pevere, Margherita, Haapoja, Terike. “Non/Living Queerings, Undoing Certainties, and Braiding Vulnerabilities: A Collective Reflection”. Artnodes, [online], 2021, No. 27, doi:10.7238/a.v0i27.374989 .

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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