Paper short abstract:

A profound example of change, and exchange, organ transplants question matter, function and reciprocity. Can this direct embodied encounter defined by the corporeal body be reconfigured from the medical towards the intermingling subjectivities of object exchanges and transformative art pedagogy?

Paper long abstract:

The kidney, once my father’s still lives in the same house as him, has the same function, but is now a few meters away, located within another body. Neither recipient or donor have ever seen the uprooted organ, but it is fundamentally present, tucked on the underside of my mother’s abdomen.

The physical cut that took place to enable the object to be perceived with more worth and status was accompanied with an emotional and conceptual rupture – rupture is described by Alain Badiou as ‘a radical disruption that leads to a subsequent truth procedure which reconfigures the existing knowledge frameworks’ (Badiou, 2005, p. 33). This radical disruption is the relocation and new perception of the organ. It’s altered perception is both for donor and recipient as the objects reordering re contextualises its position, its image, its idea. It is greater than the sum of its parts, more than its matter. It is imagined, removed, held, plumbed in, felt and remembered.

What was understood never returns to its earlier state of being and dislocations become ‘fundamental encounters’ (Deleuze, 1968) of the physical and the thoughtful body. Can the transplant be reinterpreted as a way of making new meaning - a metaphor of inter –subjective transformation? Whilst not inflicted on the flesh of the body, a transformative learning encounter calls for a new state of understanding and can re-root and re-order the individual. Can objects be re-positioned, shared and held in the context of art pedagogy to question perceptions and epistemologies?