Paper short abstract:

Exploring themes of self & other, connectivity & assemblage, The Heart Project uses visual and media arts to realize and disseminate the findings of a long-term interdisciplinary research collaboration looking at the phenomenological effects of heart transplant for recipients and donor families.

Paper long abstract:

For more than ten years an international, interdisciplinary team of medical practitioners, social scientists, artists and a philosopher have worked together to investigate the phenomenological effects of heart transplant on recipients and donor families in Canada. Based in the cardiac unit at Toronto General Hospital, this unique initiative has increasingly focused on artworks as a fulcrum for interdisciplinary exchange on the subject of heart transplantation and wider issues of intercorporeality and kinship.

Based exclusively on interviews with heart recipients and donor families, our research has shown that as well as blurring the boundaries between self and other, organ transplantation has deep implications for our understanding of the relation between death and 'staying alive'. We discovered that recipients of donor organs often find the experience of surviving an otherwise certain death is fraught with complex emotions about the relationship between the self and the now dead other, whilst donor families understandably wish to see the donor living on in another. Working closely with the rest of the team, artists Ingrid Bachmann (CA), Andrew Carnie (GB) and Alexa Wright (GB) have created works in a variety of media to explore the personal experiences of both heart recipients and donor families. In this presentation we will introduce our unique working processes and show some the artworks which, using a range of media including video, sound, interactive installation, drawing and photography, tackle emotive aspects of transplantation that resist verbal or textual communication.