Short Abstract:

This roundtable brings together artists who, through their practices, consider the posthuman agency, ‘vital materiality’ and aesthetics of care of and for microbial organisms. The discussants consider the transformative and political nature of making and doing with microbes.

Long Abstract:

Although art is an anthropocentric framework related to intention in a human social context, it can be an (auto-)ethnographic practice through which to attend to complex dimensions of multispecies life (Kirksey and Helmreich, 2010). Many artistic works instrumentalize microorganisms, framing them alternately as laborers, tools or materials to be used for their own ends. However, microbes transform the world in ways that can be understood as artistic, creative, or otherwise generative.

The artists in this roundtable explore art-microbe-human relations through lenses of care. Feminist STS scholars argue that caring is an important (and even necessary) way of knowing scientific worlds (Eren, 2023; Giraud and Hollin, 2016; Haraway, 2008; Mol et al., 2010; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017). Microbial care here refers to an attentiveness to and affective engagement with microbes, a form of ‘withnessing’ through which the methodological, conceptual and ontological positionings of who and what is being drawn together can be realized (Brives, Matthäus and Sariola, 2021). It is a practice that demands a situated, nuanced and responsive attunement as a ‘speculative commitment’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) to microbial agency and care through and beyond (speculative, imaginary, anthropocentric) modes.

The microbial artists around this table will consider:

* the ethics of instrumentalizing more-than-human relationships, where marginalized (dehumanized) human others also form part of this network of relations;

* embodied, spatial, situated, felt, experienced, materialized speculative encounters between microbial and more-than-human worlds as sites of relational negotiation

*the imaginary potentialities of these kinships as sites where the agency and desires of the microbial other can be taken into account

*empathy with microorganisms as subjects in their own right

*human health as part of ecological health, the leakiness of our bodies, and the holobiont nature of multispecies natures

*microbial worldings as queer and response-able ecologies