Bioart Society is happy to announce three new international collaboration projects kicking off in early 2021: ART4MED, ArcHIVE, and m/other becomings.
The ART4MED Creative Europe project centers at the intersection of art, health, and biomedical research. ART4MED takes the form of extended residencies, a series of workshops, seminars, and exhibitions in Finland and across Europe.
ART4MED addresses questions such as: What kind of artistic approaches can deal with such complex issues as health and biomedicine, and what are successful strategies for production and presentation? How can we share good practices and methodologies for cross-disciplinary collaboration? How can we consolidate and broaden the networks of contemporary cultural operators dealing with health and biomedical research? How can we disseminate this content beyond our immediate peer networks? How can art improve awareness of the wider public on issues of health and care?
Bioart Society collaborates with Emilia Tikka, transdisciplinary designer and researcher, who is working on a new project titled Xeno-Optimizations for Arctic Survival.
"Speculating on biomedical enhancement and posthuman survival in more-than-human worlds of the Finnish Arctic as global warming advances two times faster in arctic areas, radical re-imaginings of human-nature- technology relations are urgently required. Non-occidental cosmologies will form a frame for collaborative technoscientific speculations, critically engaging with questions of biomedical use of the genome-editing technology CRISPR and more-than-human survival in the era of climate crisis."
–Emilia Tikka
ART4MED is a collaboration between Makery (FR), Waag (NL), Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), Bioart Society (FI), and Kersnikova (SI). It is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
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The ArcHIVE Creative Europe project aims to create an open-source digital platform to document bioart practices. ArcHIVE addresses the challenges of creating and distributing cohesive digitization and dissemination methods for best practices. As part of the project, Bioart Society will deliver case studies for exhibitions as well as wet lab and field workshops.
Created through the collaboration of six partners working in the NGO and museum sector, publishing, and IT and audio-visual field, the platform serves as catalyst and facilitation tool for the digitization, archiving and distribution of artworks and museum specimens; remote event participation, planning and realization; augmented publishing; staff and student education and training; and content contextualization and interconnection.
The project partners are Cultivamos Cultura (PT), KONTEJNER (HR), Bioart Society (FI), Kersnikova (SI), Hangar (SP), and Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (BE). ArcHIVE is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union.
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m/other becomings will - through durational collaborations between experimental cultural institutions, artists, and thinkers - cultivate intergenerational and multispecies methodologies, make space for the investigation of domestic resistance practices, and probe technologies of reproduction, resilience, and recuperation.
"With this project, we want to take a closer look at the im/possibilities of mothering, not as an essence, but as troubled practice and as a modest, utopian, and oftentimes exhausted precursor of hope. We want to ask what it means - and may come to mean - to make, to mend, to make space for kin in spite of and against the social reproduction of sameness and compliance, and the (bio)politics of gendered and racialized violence. We want to explore reproductive futures and how life sciences give an opportunity to transform and challenge our ideas and possibilities of reproduction and the maternal."
–from the m/other becomings curatorial statement
The project is a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE), Art Lab Gnesta (SE), and Bioart Society (FI). It is supported by Bikuben Fonden, The Nordic Culture Fund and A.P. Møller Fonden.
To read more about m/other becomings, visit https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/m-slash-other-becomings.
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Image from Kultivating m/other Tongues, a collaborative workshop between Kultivator and the Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), 2019 (m/other becomings).