During November and December, an online lecture series will explore the themes and curatorial aspects of m/other becomings. The lecture series is organised in collaboration with the MA program in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (Aalto University), Patrizia Costantin.

The invited speakers are Riina Hannula, Ida Bencke, Signe Johannessen and Lyndsey Walsh. 

Register in advance for the talk (All times EET): 

12.11.2021 17-18h  Ida Bencke https://aalto.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Nr6rX_1xRs6Na_C-c2u3Kg
19.11.2021 17h30 -18h30 Signe Johannessen  https://aalto.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_MXCIs9QRSTeCvrVKwYeRQg
26.11.2021 17-18h  Riina Hannula https://aalto.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FG_ywM1_RHSeW_tfcgpyIA
03.12.2021 17-18h   Lyndsey Walsh https://aalto.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_c9IVhQySRdmesMcdNPKRIg 

12.11.2021 m/other becomings - on exhaustion, collectivity and care in curatorial practice

The exhibition project m/other becomings probes various intersections of motherhood and otherhood from ecological, social and technological perspectives, and is implemented and unfolded within non-typical art settings such as a farm and a hospital. m/other becomings explores practices of care and kin-making beyond the normative nuclear family unit, beyond the gatekeepings of anthropocentrism, and traces interconnections between exhausted bodies, communities and ecosystems. But what happens when we take questions of care to sites and working situations that are particularly vulnerable? How can we develop projects that do not merely speak of care, but implements care as core practice and project methodology, and with what consequences to our working cultures? In this talk, curator Ida Bencke will unfold some of the main questions, problems and potentials in curating a project with emphasis on care and collectivity within ecosystems and working cultures built around ableism, competition and resilience.

Ida Bencke, MA, is an independent curator with the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her curatorial work spans experimental exhibition formats and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. Her recent exhibition projects explore questions around shared vulnerabilities, and technologies of care and resistance within a more-than-human field. Research interests include political implications and radical potentials of rest, refusal and pleasure politics.

19.11.2021 Evoking hybridity guided by hard bones and soft tissues

The public talk will revolve around Signe Johannesson's ongoing research of an archeological find that was extracted in a wetland outside of Örebro, Sweden in 1948. The find contains a female body, with the jaw of a dog, a horse's hoof, a pig's foot and the shoulder blade of a cow. Throughout Johannesson will take a closer look at what hidden knowledge rests in this find and how this particular case can provide a key to unlock some long lost more than human family bonds and relationships. She will share her research and some of the outputs that orbits this find to explore states of mothering and othering. The research will result in a soloshow at Örebro Konsthall 2023 curated by Caroline Malmström.

In a world characterized by great challenges, Signe Johannessen asks questions about humankind's relationship to the rest of nature and its embedded power structures. The work is often based on interdisciplinary investigations.
Johannessen is educated at the Oslo Academy of the Arts and the Royal institute of Art in Stockholm. In public space she works as the duo Rören/Johannessen. She is one of the founders and artistic directors of Art Lab Gnesta, A collective practice, organisation and place for experimental connections between art and society situated in the swedish countrysside south of stockholm.
 

26.11.2021 Agentialguts/ M/other becomings

Agentialguts/ M/other becomings The more-than-human practice of care with goats listens-looks-senses farm animals that have become with us humans via the long history of domestication. Agential Guts for M/other becomings speculates how to co-live respecting goats as companion animals and to embody multispecies situations beyond utility value. Goats, humans, and their microflora are creating the knowledge for this project together. The focus of Agential Gut is to speculate with the agency of micro-organisms that travel between bodies making them leaky. Deploying a relational focus of microbes in mammalian sociality makes space for becomings that perhaps escape the traditional hierarchies and classification of identities set up by western thought. The project tries to find the guts to make sense of ancient microbial wisdom. 

Riina Hannula are a human-microbial consortium living in a multispecies tribe. Creating a practice of more-than-human care with earth others like goats, peafowl, soils, plants, microbes, bunnies, chickens, and cats they try to live sustainable and post-anthropocentric life. They co-think, co-live, and co-constitute for and with companion species. Ethico-aesthetics are embedded in the actual becomings with and is expressed with video, sound, live situations, and installation. Hannula are also doing a Ph.D. in social sciences in the Microbial Lives: Practices of New Human-Microbial Cultures project having a post-anthropocentric focus for humans as holobionts. Hannula's doctoral thesis combines science and technology studies with art-based research in the emerging field of microbial sociology. 
 

03.12.2021 Living in the Waiting Room: Caring for the (Diseased) Body in Media

Lyndsey Walsh’s “Self-Care” confronts the inheritance of bodily trauma and the impact of the medical gaze on the so-called female body. Embedded in personal narrative and bodily exploration, the work seeks to question bodily identities associated with disease, gender, and care. “Self-Care” seeks to queer these notions by rearticulating bodily relationships in the face of genetic-based disease diagnostics and familial histories of cancer. In this lecture, Lyndsey will discuss the theoretical framing and background behind “Self-Care” and how it relates to the BioArt Society’s “m/other becomings” program. Moving from this theoretical framing, Lyndsey will discuss the complex history of media activism, art, and media representations of breast cancer presented in Lisa Cartwright’s 1998 paper “Community and the Public Body in Breast Cancer Media Activism”. Lyndsey will reflect on the changes that have emerged since the paper’s publication and speculate on how technology will play a role in these entanglements in the future.

Lyndsey Walsh is an American artist, writer, and researcher based in Berlin, DE. She holds a Bachelor’s in Individualized Studies from New York University and a Master’s in Biological Arts with Distinction from SymbioticA Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts at the University of Western Australia. Lyndsey is enthralled by the creatures emerging from the spaces in between and crossing over the imaginary, the becoming, and reality. Her work explores the instability surrounding the cultural and social aspects of disease, identity, the body, disability, death, human and non-human relationships, and speculative narratives on the future. She is ½ of the feral and queer artistic collaboration called Crawlers, along with Australian artist and writer Jess Cockerill. She has exhibited her work internationally and has publications with Nautilus Magazine, CLOT Magazine, The Goethe Institute, and more. Currently, Lyndsey is a visiting scholar and researcher with the Department of Experimental Biophysics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin in collaboration with the UniSysCat Cluster of Excellence in Germany and a Professor of Practice at the Art & Science Centre at ITMO University in St. Petersburg, Russia.