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Short Abstract

This paper explores the ways bioartists repurpose historical buildings and ruins into artistic spaces and works, creating heritage in and of spaces and places long forgotten or ignored.

Abstract

Bioartists are a unique form of citizen scientists who work to democratize knowledge production and claims to knowledge about both nature and culture in unique and collaborative ways. From collective permafrost walks to collecting microbes in nuclear power plants, a growing contingent of bioart today focuses on reclaiming both natural and infrastructural ruins as a method of cultivating and archiving heritage. Heritage here is decidedly open, indexing both national and planetary ruins as bioartists are not always bounded by or to one specific cultural formation. Indeed, these bioartistic citizen scientists are generating heritage in spaces and places often forgotten or ignored, including nuclear power plants, prisons, and military bunkers. Mobilizing empirical cases of bioartists repurposing historical ruins for bioartistic purposes, this paper explores the ways bioart as a citizen science can contribute to building heritage archives from out of the way and oft-forgotten places and spaces, ruins overtaken by nature. In particular, this paper will demonstrate how the act of ruination transforms the out of the way places and spaces into nature-cultures, such that what is then salvaged and repurposed by bioartists is a hybrid of heritage that embodies the socialization of nature and the naturalization of culture. I will also illustrate how bioart as a practice is often predicated on collaborations between bioartists and communities in ways that compare to anthropology. I therefore argue that bioart might inspire anthropological theory and methods as a collaborative citizen science that attends to the manifestation and subsequent archiving of heritage as nature-cultures.