Lisa Taliano

This essay introduces a collaborative art research project that applies trans-corporeality as a method for mapping some chemical relations that make up a Critical Zone contaminated by Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs). Our creative methodology leverages the conceptual framework of new materialist feminist theorists as a means to understand environmental
health and justice through an examination of the porosity between bodies and the systems in which they are enmeshed. It emerges from personal injuries and the desire for justice, using trans-corporeality, as defined by Stacy Alaimo in Bodily Natures, as the structuring principle for a new ethical and political aesthetic engagement. Given the irreversibility of the damage done by these ‘forever chemicals’, the guiding question of the project is, how can we imagine new ways of living in a world severely altered by chemical pollution?

The human race has become a geological force. Ecological problems are no longer just an issue of our impact on the environment, they’re about our impact on the earth’s system. The magnitude of the accelerated transformation has turned ecological questions into questions of survival and has disoriented us in space and time. The newness of the situation and its complexity makes it difficult to fully know what the issues are. For that reason, philosophers like Bruno LaTour, Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway call on artists to work across disciplines  to help visualize, come up with a new cosmology, myths, and representations of the world to render us sensitive to these issues. This talk will focus on the success and failure of Bruno LaTour’s interdisciplinary performance lecture – Inside.  The performance lecture is the result of his working with artists  to find a new way of representing the world from the inside, as opposed to the world represented as a blue globe from outer space.  Given that life exists within a very thin layer of activity on the earth’s crust, a feeling for the sensitivity of this skin is difficult to represent when you imagine it from the outside.  We are not in a globe, we are on top of a very thin layer of the earth. Everything we see and encounter in life exist in this tiny critical zone. The artist’s role in the scientific/political philosophical situation will be to find ways to render ourselves sensitive to this layer.