LEARNING OUTCOMES
Student will learn to work experimentally in collaboration. To see the strength of her/ his skills and knowledge and to respect and relay on others.
Credits: 5
Schedule: 05.11.2021 - 10.12.2021
Teacher in charge (valid for whole curriculum period):
Teacher in charge (applies in this implementation): Patrizia Costantin, Max Ryynänen
Contact information for the course (applies in this implementation):
Patrizia Costantin patrizia.costantin@aalto.fi
CEFR level (valid for whole curriculum period):
Language of instruction and studies (applies in this implementation):
Teaching language: English. Languages of study attainment: English
CONTENT, ASSESSMENT AND WORKLOAD
Content
valid for whole curriculum period:
Course is collaborative course on varying topics with other study programme, department or school in Aalto, or other Universities in Finland or intenationally. Of this course more information will be published latest by the end of previous semester.
applies in this implementation
Organised as a collaboration with Bioart Society, this course explores in depts some of the themes and curatorial aspects of 'm/other becomings’ through the perspectives of the producer, curator, and artists involved in the project. Students will participate at aspects of project production through planned assignments. This is supported by talks and workshops with guests (see schedule below) and tutorials.
Bioart Society is a Helsinki-based association developing, producing and facilitating activities around art and natural sciences with an emphasis on Biology, ecology and life sciences. It runs SOLU Space, an artistic laboratory and platform for art, science and society in Katajanokka, Helsinki, and - together with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki - Ars Bioarctica, an art & science program with focus on the sub-Arctic environment. The Bioart Society was established in May 2008 and currently has 127 members from Finland and other countries.
THEMES of the course: ethics of curating living, multispecies organisms, bioart in the gallery; multispecies methodologies, technologies of reproduction and reproductive futures, mothering bodies/morphologies, motherhood and gender.
Running on Fridays from 5th November to the 12th of December 2021.
ABOUT MOTHER BECOMING/S
https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/m-slash-other-becomings
Through durational collaborations between experimental cultural institutions, artists, and thinkers, m/other becomings will cultivate intergenerational and multispecies methodologies, make space for the investigation of domestic resistance practices, and probe technologies of reproduction, resilience, and recuperation.
m/other becomings is a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE), Art Lab Gnesta (SE), and Bioart Society (FI).
m/other becomings - curatorial statementMothering bodies are boundary creatures; they inhabit a liminal space between the mundane and the strange. Mothering bodies may manifest an ultimate gender conformity, but they are also portals into feral and messy morphologies, resisting the self-other divide so foundational to the epistemologies of Western modernity. As fierce, tired, vulnerable, heavy, and porous carriers in perpetual interconnection, perpetual attachment, mothering bodies swell, stretch, envelope, and leak in all directions, and challenge regimes based on linearity, progress, and subjecthood by foregrounding everyday, repetitive, and frankly unglamorous practices of sustaining life by confirming and continuing kinship.
Often, motherhood is enrolled in the sanctioning of Women as the biologically given frontworkers in regimes of care and reproduction. (White, heterosexual, able-bodied, affluent) Motherhood has been - and still very much is - weaponized in the often violent perpetuation of a political status quo, and utilized in the othering of marginalized bodies, practices, and cultures.
However, mothering as an action instead of essence, as the quotidian practices of cultivating, carrying, and caring for kin - holds radical potential as it opens towards relations and recuperation beyond the nuclear family, beyond its gender politics and its state-sanctioned economies of labour, consumption and affect.
With this project, we want to take a closer look at the im/possibilities of mothering, not as an essence, but as troubled practice and as a modest, utopian, and oftentimes exhausted precursor of hope. We want to ask what it means - and may come to mean - to make, to mend, to make space for kin in spite of and against the social reproduction of sameness and compliance, and the (bio)politics of gendered and racialized violence. We want to explore reproductive futures and how life sciences give an opportunity to transform and challenge our ideas and possibilities of reproduction and the maternal.
How may we come to mother, to host, and to make dwelling for each other in ways that cancel the brutal mechanisms of othering from within political and ecological landscapes enrolled in and wretched by ongoing necropolitics of coloniality and extractive capitalism? What happens when the technologies and politics of the maternal are unleashed from the affective and economic structures of heteronormative reproduction, from natality, and even from species’ genealogies? m/other becomings will investigate junctions and leaky borderlands between motherhood and otherhood. Tentatively probing into the potentials of bringing forth an insurgent, but also non-innocent politics of care by investigating the strangeness of mothers as it pushes against conventional notions of body, self, family, and belonging.
m/other becomings draws from an earlier curatorial conversation, which also included the Multispecies Salon and Art Laboratory Berlin initiated by Ida Bencke and Eben Kirksey.
Program overviewm/other becomings will start in late spring 2021 with a program organised by the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology in Copenhagen in collaboration with the Center for Art and Mental Health and ARIEL - Feminisms in the Aesthetics.
During summer 2021, Kultivator will host a workshop on the project topics. The findings of the workshop will be presented in an exhibition at Art Lab Gnesta during the autumn of 2021.
m/other becomings will finish in Helsinki in the spring of 2022 with a concluding exhibition and symposia.
Assessment Methods and Criteria
valid for whole curriculum period:
Workshop, discussions, lectures, independent-/groupwork
applies in this implementation
ASSIGNMENTS:
Students are required to carry out independent research and also work on:
Assignment 1 - ALL: collective curatorial annotated bibliography for m/other becomings: each student will have to research and find 2-3 texts (when I say text, I mean that in an expanded sense, a text can be any narrative object like a book, an article, an artwork, an exhibition, a talk, a podcast...) and review these (in 1-2 paragraphs each). To be completed by 12 December.
Assignment 2 - ALL: produce an index/how to document for curating bio-art. We will use the works of Riina Hannula And Lyndsey Walsh as case-studies. This includes all the motions from commissioning the work to its installation and beyond. This will produce a compendium on practicalities of exhibiting bioart, including anticipated issues and potential solutions). This assignment requires 2h preparation (group discussion) during the last week prior to the last session, when we will work collectively to compile the documents with Bioart Society. To be completed by 12 December.
- 2 PAIRS/SMALL GROUPS: collect questions for interviews with the artists. Questions to be completed by 12 December with the option to carry out the interviews after the course finishes.
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EXTRA - IN ADDITION/GOOD TO KNOW (not required to pass this course but extra credits and potential paid work): As this is a collaboration on a project external to the university, our course does not match the time of the exhibition. However, students who take part to the course will have the opportunity to keep working on the project during the exhibition in early 2022 (extra credits, some paid work, and one opportunity for an internship with Aalto vouchers). More of this will be discussed at the first session but work includes: video documentation of the exhibition (paid and/or study project elective credits), video documentation of the side programme (paid), interviews with artists and collaborative text on the exhibition with images (study project elective credits).
More information will be given on the first session.
Scheduled group tutorials/discussions will take place on week 3 and 4 at agreed times with the class. Individual tutorials are also available and can be booked by contacting Patrizia via email at patrizia.costantin@aalto.fi
80% Attendance mandatory.
Workload
valid for whole curriculum period:
Contact teaching 68h and independent 67h.
DETAILS
Study Material
valid for whole curriculum period:
Will be provided in syllabus
applies in this implementation
Readings and prep material will be sent through Mycourses one week in advance of each session (starting from session 2).
All materials will be also made available on Mycourses.
Substitutes for Courses
valid for whole curriculum period:
Prerequisites
valid for whole curriculum period:
FURTHER INFORMATION
Further Information
valid for whole curriculum period:
Teaching Period:
2020-2021 Autumn II
2021-2022 Autumn II
Course Homepage: https://mycourses.aalto.fi/course/search.php?search=TAI-E314902
Registration for Courses: Sisu replaces Oodi on 9 August, 2021. Priority order to courses is according to the order of priority decided by the Academic committee for School of Arts, Design and Architecture: https://www.aalto.fi/en/services/registering-to-courses-and-the-order-of-priority-in-aalto-arts
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Details on the schedule
applies in this implementation
COURSE PROGRAMME:
All sessions: 15:15-18:00 (a part from 16/11 15:15-18:30) online
5 NOVEMBER https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
(times may shift slightly)
15:15-16:45 Introduction to curating bio-art by Erich Berger. Erich will introduce the work of Bioart Society which is one of the partners in the m/other becomings project. He will examine some artwork as case-studies for exploring the challenges of curating bio-art in a gallery space. He will talk about bio-safety, bio-security, life support for the artworks' materiality and the curatorial process involved with curating this particular kind of work. The talk will last approximately 45 minutes, after that you will have the opportunity to ask question and have a discussion (20-25minutes) .
After the discussion, we will go through the assignments and opportunities that you will have after attending this course. (20 minutes)
16:45-17:00 break
17:00-18:00 Reading group with Patrizia. We will discuss the text ''The Uses and Abuses of Female Reproductive Bodies'' by Rickie Solinger (April 2021).
Please read this in advance.
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CONFIRMED SPEAKERS/CONTRIBUTORS:
12 NOVEMBER
Ida Bencke – Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK). Curatorial lead m/other becomings
Workshop: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
Talk: m/other becomings - on exhaustion, collectivity and care in curatorial practice
https://aalto.zoom.us/s/69716046357
The exhibition project m/other becomings probes various intersections of motherhood and otherhood from ecological, social and technological perspectives, and is implemented and unfolded within non-typical art settings such as a farm and a hospital. m/other becomings explores practices of care and kin-making beyond the normative nuclear family unit, beyond the gatekeepings of anthropocentrism, and traces interconnections between exhausted bodies, communities and ecosystems. But what happens when we take questions of care to sites and working situations that are particularly vulnerable? How can we develop projects that do not merely speak of care, but implements care as core practice and project methodology, and with what consequences to our working cultures? In this talk, curator Ida Bencke will unfold some of the main questions, problems and potentials in curating a project with emphasis on care and collectivity within ecosystems and working cultures built around ableism, competition and resilience.---19 NOVEMBER (15:15-18:30)
Signe Johannessen – Art Lab Gnesta (SE). Collaborating organisation m/other becomings
Workshop: Clever Girl
https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
I want to invite the students to watch Jurassic park 1 (accessible on Netflix or Amazon Prime - if you don't have access any of these, please contact me) as research for meeting me on zoom on the 19th of November. In addition I would like to suggest that all students have 10 pages of A4 size paper available to them by their computer when we meet.
My meeting with the students will revolve around my ongoing research on different strategies of becoming and belonging. I will also address why humankind is constantly obsessed with the limitations of human life and death. Together we will embark on a practical and playful journey, and hopefully find- or create a toolset to help us explore more than human perspectives.
Talk: Evoking hybridity guided by hard bones and soft tissue
https://aalto.zoom.us/s/69716046357
The public talk will revolve around my ongoing research of an archeological find that was extracted in a wetland outside of Örebro, Sweden in 1948. The find contains a female body, with the jaw of a dog, a horse's hoof, a pig's foot and the shoulder blade of a cow. Throughout the talk we will take a closer look at what hidden knowledge rests in this find and how this particular case can provide a key to unlock some long lost more than human family bonds and relationships. I will share my research and some of the outputs that orbits this find to explore states of mothering and othering. The research will result in a soloshow at Örebro Konsthall 2023 curated by Caroline Malmström.
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26 NOVEMBER
Riina Hannula – artist (FI). Selected artist for m/other becomings
Workshop: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
In preparation please read Brian Massumi, What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014). PAGES 38-54.
Talk: Agential guts/ M/other becomings
https://aalto.zoom.us/s/63364835271
The more-than-human practice of care with goats listens-looks-senses farm animals that have become with us humans via the long history of domestication. Agential Guts for M/other becomings speculates how to co-live respecting goats as companion animals and to embody multispecies situations beyond utility value. Goats, humans, and their microflora are creating the knowledge for this project together.
The focus of Agential Gut is to speculate with the agency of micro-organisms that travel between bodies making them leaky. Deploying a relational focus of microbes in mammalian sociality makes space for becomings that perhaps escape the traditional hierarchies and classification of identities set up by western thought. The project tries to find the guts to make sense of ancient microbial wisdom.
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3 DECEMBERLyndsey Walsh - artist. Selected artist for m/other becomings
Workshop: https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
In preparation please read Lisa Cartwright (1998) COMMUNITY AND THE PUBLIC BODY IN BREAST CANCER MEDIA ACTIVISM, Cultural Studies, 12:2, 117-138
Talk: Living in the Waiting Room: Caring for the (Diseased) Body in Media
https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
Lyndsey Walsh’s “Self-Care” confronts the inheritance of bodily trauma and the impact of the medical gaze on the so-called female body. Embedded in personal narrative and bodily exploration, the work seeks to question bodily identities associated with disease, gender, and care. “Self-Care” seeks to queer these notions by rearticulating bodily relationships in the face of genetic-based disease diagnostics and familial histories of cancer. In this lecture, Lyndsey will discuss the theoretical framing and background behind “Self-Care” and how it relates to the BioArt Society’s “m/other becomings” program. Moving from this theoretical framing, Lyndsey will discuss the complex history of media activism, art, and media representations of breast cancer presented in Lisa Cartwright’s 1998 paper “Community and the Public Body in Breast Cancer Media Activism”. Lyndsey will reflect on the changes that have emerged since the paper’s publication and speculate on how technology will play a role in these entanglements in the future.
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10 DECEMBER https://aalto.zoom.us/j/63213812211
Concluding session led by Patrizia Costantin and Erich Berger.
15:15-17:30: On this session we will finalise and produce Assignment 2.
17:30-17:40 Break
17:40-18:00 We will also dedicate some time to the organisation of potential future tasks (to be carried on during and after the exhibition in 2022 with Bioart Society - see EXTRA at the end of Assignment section).