Monstrous Matter

In recent years, tales of assemblages have been the subject of numerous interdisciplinary inquiries. As scientists and humanities researchers alike question preconceived notions of “individual” species, organisms are more accurately understood as nodes in multifaceted networks — networks so intricate that it becomes impossible to distinguish where an organism begins and ends. Beings and matter aren’t whole, they are viscous porosities. The human body is not exempt from this shift in materiality. As Donna Haraway observes, “The human genomes can be found in only about 10 % of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 % of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such… I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with manyDonna J. Haraway, When Species Meet(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.." Bodies are defined no longer by genetic code and ruled by a brain but as microbial ecosystems. “Why should our bodies end at the skinDonna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178. ? " Haraway asks. Each cell, organism, and photon inhabiting our bodies and our environment is composed of what Karen Barad calls an “intra-active” host of others. By disrupting the emphasis on the individual, this reconfiguration of matter highlights the symbiotic webs of histories and bodies through which all life emerges. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet(2017), anthropologist Anna Tsing and her colleagues posit monsters as useful figures for thinking of such chimeric entanglements as well as of the monstrosities committed by humans in the AnthropoceneHeather Swanson, Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan, “Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M1 — M12. As humanity is faced with the COVID-19 outbreak, monstrosity is all the more apt for addressing the wonders and terrors of our enmeshment with the more-than-human. In this context, the porosity of being seems as relevant as it is unsettling. Exposing the precarity of the interconnectedness of our biological lives, the pandemic reminds us that the interspecies, microbial, and fungal equilibriums that enable all life to exist can also be dangerously unstable. Symbiotic relations are constantly renewed and negotiated, and when conditions suddenly shift, once life-sustaining relations become terrifying and even deadly. Artists have long developed practices deeply rooted in making sense of life’s monstrous entanglements. One of them is Croatian artist Dora Budor. Drawing on cinema, science fiction, and architectural and cultural history, Budor’s works develop as ecosystems responding to their environment inside and outside the gallery space. She exposes the ways in which matter is tightly bound in dense systems of interconnected multiplicities, hybrids, or sonorous clusters. Dora BudorThe Forecast (New York Situation), installation detail, 2017, Mutations, High Line, New York, 2017-2018.Photo : Timothy Schenck, courtesy of the artist & High Line, New York Presented on New York City’s High Line, Dora Budor’s The Forecast (New York Situation) (2017) is a weather-responsive sculpture composed of pipes, funnels, and resin containers. This soft-looking sculpture resembles a combination of miscellaneous bodily organs. When it is displayed outdoors, the rain hits its porous membrane and the hydrochromic paint covering the organs changes colour, from a mixture of yellow, orange, and ochre to grey or green. Like a creature in a sci-fi thriller, the work is in perpetual mutation, slowly shifting from one form to another. The environment is an integral part of it, a contingent agent in continual transformation. Although this piece may seem eerie and alien, in this time of environmental destruction, it is aligned with the current state of the natural world. In the Anthropocene, we can marvel at nature, but in the blink of an eye it can also become unfamiliar and terrifying. The Forecast (New York Situation) is inscribed in the materiality of the world itself; it questions the borders of a living biological body and asks that we consider notions such as entity, time, boundary, resistance, and resilience in their materiality.Barad, “No Small Matter,” 105.. Budor’s complex mechanisms are continually becoming and being undone in relation to constitutive multiplicities, and they speak to the webs that bridge the spaces between beings. As such, her practice is attuned to Haraway’s commitment to a dynamic world of “active agency”Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 593. in which everything participates in an ongoing process of world making. Thom van Dooren eloquently reflected on Haraway’s notion of worldly active agency, describing it as a “process in which all of the various actors literally and physically are the world… understanding of the world, which acknowledges that nonhuman others — many of whom are often considered to be ‘inanimate objects’ — are endowed with meaning, power and agency of their own.”Thom van Dooren, “‘I would rather be a god/dess than a cyborg’: A Pagan Encounter with Donna Haraway,” The Pomegranate7, no. 1 (2005): 44. .” This world is not whole, in the words of political theorist William Connolly, it is a provisional set of “multiple, interacting open systems of different viscosity morphing at different speedsWilliam E. Connolly, A World of Becoming(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 39. .” Rather than being homogeneous, Budor’s works are set as a multiplicity of experimentations and perspectives colliding at different speeds. Her most recent solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel, I am Gong (2019), exemplified these entangled velocities. The show was presented as a reactive organism, kept alive and fed by a convergence of historical and current events that triggered a multitude of chain reactions, like a mutating choreography. The exhibition opened with a minimal environment filled with a greenish luminosity titled The Year without a Summer (Klug’s Field) (2019). The installation alludes to the waves of severe climate abnormalities brought by the massive volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora, Indonesia, in 1816. After the eruption, the skies were filled with volcanic ash and sulfuric acid, which blocked incoming solar radiation, there- by drastically reducing global temperatures. Because of this volcanic dust and the pollution from the industrial revolution, the atmosphere changed colour. These changes are said to have influenced artists’ vivid portrayal of skies at the time, notably J.M.W. Turner’s famous cityscapes. This idea that an event or object transforms the materiality of the world was emblematic of Budor’s project at the Kunsthalle. She constructed material-discursive phenomena that are constituted through each other. As such, her artworks are the carriers of ghosts, as envisaged by the contributors to Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet— the vestiges and signs of past ways of life still charged in the presentElaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Bubandt, “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene,” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G3.. Dora BudorThe Preserving Machine, 2018–2019, installation view, I am Gong, Kunsthalle Basel, 2019.Photo : Philipp Hänger, courtesy of the artist & Kunsthalle Basel Dora Budor Origine I (A Stag Drinking), installation view, Istanbul Biennial, 2019. Photo : Sahir Uğur Eren, courtesy of the artist Dora BudorThe Year without a Summer (Klug’s Field), installation view, I am Gong, Kunsthalle Basel, 2019.Photo : courtesy of the artist In Basel, Budor’s quasi-post-apocalyptic mise-en-scène was intertwined with the development of the nearby construction site of the Musiksaal. The site’s reconstructions governed the formal, atmospheric, and sonic conditions of Budor’s project. Through a complex recording system, the noise pollution around the construction site mechanically triggered the dispersal of ashes throughout the exhibition space. The dust piled up on derelict 1970s leather furniture, accompanied by a nostalgic yet futuristic soundscape. The soundscape was also modulated by the activity on the Musiksaal site, creating a temporal unease across each environment. Through such installations and artworks, Budor exemplifies the core of Barad’s thinking around matter. They are traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade. They can exist only within and through intra-actions. They are motivated by Budor’s desire to set the agency of things into motion. Budor’s project additionally featured a trilogy of reactive sculptures, hovering between laboratory vitrines and aquariums. Also presented as part of the 2019 Istanbul Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud, the works consist of large rectangular glass showcases containing a foggy, dusty mixture. Each occasionally expels dust and pigments across the glass enclosure, evoking the skies of Turner’s paintings. The frequencies from the renovations of nearby industrial development sites are present here as well; the bursts of noise control the airflow inside each aquarium. These works testify to Barad’s insight that space is never empty and time is never even.Barad, “No Small Matter,” 103. Budor’s assemblages are not “hierarchical.” As Deleuze and Guattari advocated, “each multiplicity is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy.Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 275. " The COVID-19 pandemic is a monstrous cataclysm that might have shaken the core of our very understanding of our own humanity. Perhaps Budor’s practice, alongside those of other artists such as Anicka Yi or even Pierre Huyghe, precisely calls to attention such monstrous entanglements of being. Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Kate Brown recently reminded us of philosopher Emanuele Coccia’s argument that we are inhabitants not of Earth, but of its atmosphere. This atmospheric matter is beautifully entan- gled in life itself by “pollinating our plants; it also transports radioactive particles, fungal spores, bacteria, and virusesKate Brown, “The Pandemic Is Not a Natural Disaster,” The New Yorker (13 April 2020), accessible online. .” These conditions for life are as wonderful as they are monstrous, but it is useful to remind ourselves that, as the editors of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet tell us, “in our vulnerable entanglements with more-than-human life, we humans too are monsters.Swanson, Tsing, Bubandt, and Gan, “Introduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies,” M2. .” And so, even if we may feel isolated in our own homes, the pandemic reveals the depth of our imbrication in the matters that surround us. It calls into question the global ecological networks that join us together in the vibrant and messy sympoietic organism we call Earth. Dora Budor, Marie-Charlotte Carrier

Monstrous Matter

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