At the Biocultural Borderland: The Unfolding of Multispecies Encounters in Latin American Bioart

Authors

Keywords:

bioart, multispecies, biocultural borderland, Allan Jeffs, Luciana Paoletti

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyse two instances of bioart, namely, Allan Jeffs’ installation Ex+sistencia and Luciana Paoletti’s photographs Retratos, from the post-humanist perspective of multispecies encounters. According to Mitchell (2010), bioart engages artistic and scientific procedures bringing about hybrid works that explore a concept or that seek to involve the spectator in biotechnological procedures to promote the debate on the problematic of technology. Based on that theoretical framework I study how bioart experiments with living microorganisms found in human bodies and visual media to explore the co-habiting of humans and bacteria in our own bodies, thus deconstructing dominant ideas on human nature and the human body.

Author Biography

Azucena Castro, University of Stockholm

I am a PhD student at the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at the University of Stockholm. I hold a Masterʼs degree in media-culture-literature with orientation in Spanish from the University of Lund and a Bachelorʼs degree as well as a Teaching degree in English and English literature from Universidad de Córdoba, Argentina. In my ongoing doctoral dissertation, I examine the portrayal of devastated landscapes of the Anthropocene in a corpus of contemporary long poems from Latin American writers. In my research I focus on the affective responses to environmental deterioration, the assemblages between human, nonhuman, organic and nonorganic and the articulations life/matter from a post-natural perspective.

I have coauthored together with associate professor Leticia Gómez (University of Växjö) the article entitled “Cinematic Birds, Jungles and Forests: The Margins of the Human in the Environmental Crisis in Two Contemporary Movies”, which is in the peer-review process of journal specialized in ecocriticism. The article analyses two contemporary fictional films exploring the complex interactions between the human and the non-human worlds, in this case the animal world and the natural landscape, in the context of the environmental crisis in Latin America. Besides, together with Leticia Gómez and senior lecturer Anna Forné (University of Gothenburg) I have organized the panel entitled “Ecocritical Readings of Latin American Culture” for the Nordic Latin American Research Network (NOLAN) conference held in Olso on the 24th and 25th of October, 2018. Our panel addressed issues related to environmentalism, post-humanism, multispecies narratives, toxicity and pollution, among others, in a variety of Latin American artistic and literary expressions.

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Published

2019-07-31

How to Cite

Castro, A. (2019). At the Biocultural Borderland: The Unfolding of Multispecies Encounters in Latin American Bioart. 452ºF. Revista De Teoría De La Literatura Y Literatura Comparada, (21), 22–34. Retrieved from https://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/452f/article/view/27716

Issue

No. 21 (2019): Environmental Humanities: Ecocriticism and Cultural Decolonization

Section

Monograph

License

All contents published in the journal are protected under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. This corresponds to legislation within Spain, and does not allow commercial use of the texts. It is not possible to modify the contents either.

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Comparative Literature magazine 452ºF [ISSN 2013-3294] is a publishing project coordinated by Asociación Cultural 452ºF, and developed by its Editorial board.



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