In brief
This artistic research programme focuses on finding new biomaterials and developing new theoretical and practical understandings of how to live in the precarity of the future that has always been now. By engaging artists and designers with DIY biology, biohacking, life science and speculative ways and methods of working with living bodies, the programme focuses on developing ecologically and critically engaged art and design practice.
Symbiosis of theory and practice
Within BIO MATTERs what matters are difficult questions and experimentations but not in order to achieve more control, but rather to allow speculation and attentiveness to bodies’ variety, change and mutations to be present in creative practice. With a philosophically engaged hands-on approach, questions are raised, such as:
- can we envision and pursue life forms, practices, habits, and desires that will change our lives rather than make them easier?
- how can we change the anthropocentric gaze?
- how to think about what is defined as living and natural?
- what are the margins where we can care-fully create with life and what are the implications of life manipulations?
- how to practise living and dying bodies in art and design?
- how to live with contamination and its risks?
“What I enjoyed the most in the course of living images is the fact that we delved into philosophies and matters simultaneously. The concept of contamination that we worked through still haunts till now; a porosity that makes me moving as I am situated, a sort of ethical entanglement between matters that requires a responsibility of movement on a micro level; a responsibility of contamination."
Tammam Azzam (platyhelminth)
Guest student at AKI-ArtEZ - currently pursuing a Bachelor Degree at the Royal Academy of Art in the Hague.