How to participate proactively in a process of change and transformation, to shape our path within an uncertain future? With this publication, the State Of The Art Network marks a waypost on a journey which started in 2018, when like-minded Nordic and Baltic art organisations and professionals initiated this network as a multidisciplinary collaboration facing the Anthropocene. Over five years, ten organisations and around 80 practitioners from different disciplines, like the arts, natural sciences and humanities came together, online and in person, for workshops, seminars and discussions. The aim was to find ways to create resilience and concrete actions on how to live through the change in culture, economy and the environment and to find concrete, hands-on methods to deal with the Anthropocene and the environmental crisis. As an outcome of this process, this publication takes a closer look at how we as practising artists, researchers and cultural actors can create elements for critical thinking and doing which can assist us in navigating the complexities of the present.

Embodied and institutionalized discourses and practices related to death,dying and mourning are pervaded by normativities and regulations,framed by intersecting power differentials related to gender, sexuality,race, class, religion, but also to the life/death binary and to materialagencies not so commonly included in discussions of intersectionality suchas liminality, killability, uncontainability, and vibrancy. These norms andregulations have often been left unproblematized by otherwise criticalintellectuals, including academic feminists, perhaps because the situationswhere these issues materialize as crucial on personal levels also oftenare situations, where people are most vulnerable and literally pushed tothe borders of ‘the Real’, and where well known symbolic grounds do notcount anymore.The panel aims to generate new discussions around these issues, criticallyand (self) reflexively scrutinizing and challenging conventionalnormativities, assumptions, expectations and regimes of truths that arebrought to life or made evident by death, dying and mourning.The panel will among others problematize grief-related normativityas well as the anti-grief and sadness norm carried by goal-oriented,neoliberal rationality. This includes examining how sadness, memorializationand non-acceptance can be performed and articulated asresistance against prescribed ways of mourning and being a mourner.Moreover, the panel will explore how boundaries between life/theliving and death/the dead are drawn, conceptualized and imagined, andwhat these boundary-shaping practices reveal about the role of religion,tradition, science, economy, and so on. Often sharp dichotomies areutilized to make sense of the relationship between life/death, the living/the dead, animate/inanimate, and of ethical distinctions bound to normsrelated human exceptionalism, contrasted by the precarious status oflives not counted within such norms. However, in some contexts suchdichotomies are nuanced and deconstructed. Concepts like absencepresence,liminality and social death, have, for example, been used indeath studies to address the false simplicity of the pre/post-mortem divide, while some bioart practices have created artworks on the boundariesbetween living and non-living meant to prompt new reflections on these.

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better define queer death studies?The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct.

In the Anthropocene, the epoch of climate change and environmental destruction that render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from all stakeholders: governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020). Simultaneously, climate change, wars – as it is painfully manifested through the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine – and unsustainable living conditions contribute to the mortality and suffering of humans and nonhumans, destruction of entire ecosystems and populations, loss of biodiversity, the sixth mass extinction, and ‘slow’ – as well as very abrupt – environmental violence (Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2020; Åsberg & Radomska 2021). All of these evoke feelings of anger, anxiety and grief, manifested both globally and locally in popular-scientific narratives, cultural and artistic expressions, and environmental activism.This paper explores crisis imaginaries linked to more-than-human death, dying and extinction, as well as questions of ecological grief (or eco-grief), which the former are inherently entwined with. After unpacking the genealogy of the concept of eco-grief and its interlinked notions, I briefly sketch out the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies, which this presentation is grounded in, and subsequently I look at several examples of contemporary bio-, eco-and media art that mobilise and – at times – subvert the notions of and mourning the more-than-human.

While the notion of bereavement linked to the death of a human or to the loss of that which hasalready passed are societally accepted or even expected, the mourning of nonhuman death andecological loss has a rather different status. It is frequently described as ‘disenfranchised grief’(Doka 1989): not openly accepted or acknowledged in society. Simultaneously, in the presentanthropocenic context, where planetary environmental destruction generates unliveable spacesand amplifies ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, the killing of nonhuman populations, annihilationof entire ecosystems and species extinction catalyse discussions among scientists, legal experts,activists and general society. Yet, it is not only natural-scientific and legal, but also philosophical,artistic and cultural understandings of death and eco-grief that are urgently needed. Grounded inQDS, this talk zooms in on the imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, as theyare interwoven through the tissues of select contemporary artworks, where ecological ontologyof death is being exposed and where ethical territories of eco-grief and mourning the more-thanhuman unfold.

The posthumanities is a transdisciplinary research area that combines critical and creative engagement with arts, sciences, technologies, cultural research and critique in order to explore, attend to, and problematise dynamic human/nonhuman relationalities and entanglements of bodies, technologies and environments in a more-than-human world. Thinking with and through bioart opens up an onto-epistemological and ethical enquiry in such a posthumanist manner.

The aim of this article is to examine the concept of biopolitics - a form of power/politics the object of which is the very biological life (Aristotle's zoe ) of the human species. Although the term of biopolitics was employed for the first time at the beginning of the 20th century by a Swedish theorist, Rudolf Kjellén, it is Michel Foucault who thoroughly discussed it and conducted its genealogy. Taking Foucault's analyses as my point of departure, I will examine Giorgio Agamben's negative idea of biopolitics (tanathopolitics) that sets a threshold below which life can be annihilated with impunity. Finally, I will raise the question of the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics.

The article analyses philosophical premises of the feminist posthumanist ethical project, while drawing on the theories of Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway.

This paper stems from a larger project, set against the backdrop of contemporary discursive and material unfoldings of the environmental crises as well as their accompanying cultural and scientific imaginaries.

In the project, I ask what happens when contemporary art (especially body, eco- and bioart) – in a dialogue with feminist materialist philosophies – is mobilised in order to challenge the conventional (i.e. anchored in the Western tradition of the autonomous (exclusively) human subject) understandings of death, and assess multiple vulnerabilities and power differentials that form part of the materialisations of ecologies of death in the context of the Anthropocene.

In other words, the project examines how contemporary art read through the lens of feminist materialist philosophies (e.g. Colebrook, MacCormack, Grosz) may – and do – queer, that is, unsettle, subvert and exceed binaries, given norms, normativities, and conventions that frame and govern the bodies and processes constitutive of death, extinction and annihilation, especially in the given environmental context.

In order to do so, we need an adequate set of tools. In the present paper, I argue for a tripartite methodology that queers the traditional human-exceptionalist concept of death: (1) feminist biophilosophy as an examination that does not search for an ‘essence’ of life, but instead focuses on the processes that take life beyond itself; (2) ‘the non/living’ (Radomska 2016) as a way to conceptualise death/life entanglement; and (3) queer vitalism as a ground for aesthetics (Colebrook 2014). By discussing each of these components and employing them in the analysis of select artworks (e.g. by Australian artist Svenja Kratz), I hope to open up a space for discussion on this queer(ing) methodology’s potential for mobilising a novel feminist-materialist understanding of both ontology and ethics of death.

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice (2008–2011) by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living.

In the present condition of planetary environmental crises, violence, and war, entire ecosystems are annihilated, habitats turn into unliveable spaces, and shared “more-than-human” vulnerabilities get amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns, while the Anthropocene-induced anxiety, anger, and grief are manifested in popular-scientific narratives, art, culture, and activism.Grounded in the theoretical framework of queer death studies, this article explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as they are interwoven through contemporary art. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold.

In the present condition of planetary environmental disruption, including both slow and abrupt violence (Nixon 2011; Neimanis 2020) and even war, entire ecosystems are being annihilated, habitats turned into unlivable spaces, socio-economic inequalities intensified, and shared, more-than-human vulnerabilities amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. Grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies and particularly in the concept of the “deterritorialization of death” (Radomska 2020), this talk explores contemporary crisis imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction as they are woven through the tissue of contemporary bio-, eco- and new-media art. It is in these spaces of (non)living artworks that conventional frames of human exceptionalism are questioned, ecological ontology of death exposed, and ethical territories of ecological grief and mourning the more-than-human unfold.

While the contemporary context of environmental crises and the accompanying degradation of food and water resources render certain habitats unliveable, leading to the death of individual organisms, populations and species extinction, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between the human and nonhuman others. It is in death specifically that the human (of the humanities and social sciences, in particular) fences himself off from other forms of life: it is essentially human death that deserves individual attention and respect, which, for example, substantially differ from the usual treatment of dead animal bodies. Simultaneously, bioscience and biotechnologies emphasise interdependency and relationality as key characteristics of life shared by all organisms. In this paper I focus on the ways select examples of contemporary bioart may allow us to reinvent our approach to death and think its ethico-ontology as multiplex ecologies of the non/living

Elämä tavataan nähdä kuoleman vastakohtana. Tällaisen kahtiajaon ulkopuolelle mahtuu kuitenkin paljon ontologisia ja eettisiä kysymyksiä, joita on lähdettävä purkamaan toisesta suunnasta. Marietta Radomska ja Cecilia Åsberg ehdottavat suunnaksi biofilosofiaa, jossa elämistä ja kuolemista tarkastellaan yhteen kietoutuneina ja yhdessä muuttuvina.

In the context of bioscience (as much as in the field of bioart) that engages with tissue bioengineering, the life of the cultured cells is closely intertwined with the issues of biohazardous waste, contagion, death, and control (over the manipulated ‘living’). While looking at one of the exhibitions during which Australian bioartists The Tissue Culture & Art Project showed their ‘semi-living’ sculpture the Victimless Leather Jacket, which unexpectedly became contaminated with fungi, I will examine the material-discursive entanglements of the ideas of death, life, and the uncontainability of the latter that are enacted through the bioartwork as well as bioartistic practices in a broader sense.

In the times of climate change and planetary environmental disruption that turn certain habitats into unliveable spaces and contribute to socio-economic inequalities and vulnerabilities, (more-than-human) death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020).  Simultaneously, unsustainable living conditions contributing to the mortality of human and nonhuman individuals, destruction of entire ecosystems, loss of biodiversity and the sixth mass extinction evoke feelings of anxiety, anger and grief, manifested globally in popular-scientific narratives, cultural expressions, and environmental activism.  

In this paper I explore crisis imaginaries linked to more-than-human death, dying and extinction (material and figurative), as well as questions of eco-grief, which the former are inherently entwined with. After unpacking the genealogy of the concept of eco-grief and its interlinked notions, I briefly sketch out the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies, which this talk is embedded in, and subsequently I look at several examples of contemporary bio-, eco-and media art that mobilise and – at times – subvert the notions of and mourning the more-than-human. 

This article aims to discuss and challenge speciesism and anthropocentrism that structure Western philosophy and culture. By looking at new directions in both contemporary feminist theory and art, the text asks about possibilities of thinking a non-anthropocentric and non-speciesist ethics of care.

From Terminal Ecologies to Non/Living Matters: Towards a Deterritorialisation of Death  In the contemporary context of multiple crises, planetary-scale necropolitics contributes to the creation of unliveable spaces and ‘terminal’ conditions; social and environmental violence; the death of individuals and species extinction. While natural sciences emphasise interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life on Earth, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and other organisms, particularly evident in the context of death, where some deaths are set as ungrievable or not recognised as deaths in the full sense of the word. Against this backdrop, I will look at how select examples of contemporary bio- and eco-art challenge the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death; how they attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying; and what follows, how they reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of non/living matters.

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Lichens are holobionts consisting of fungi and algae or cyanobacteria (and possibly other microorganisms), living in a symbiotic relationship. They are resilient “pioneer organisms” that are among the first species to grow in previously uninhabited areas, able to survive in extreme temperatures and harsh environments. In the Nordic context, they are crucial players in the biodiversity of especially boreal and arctic region, where they significantly contribute to biomass and are a primary source of food for reindeer. Simultaneously, lichens are sensitive to air pollution and climate changes, which render them critical in the study of human-induced changes in ecosystems.

In this paper (forming part of the very early stages of a transdisciplinary project focused on ecologies of death in the context of contemporary environmental crises), I take lichens as both a figuration and a case study. By thinking with lichens inhabiting the Nordic region, I will try to explore the ethico-ontological questions of living and dying in the Anthropocene.

Bioart is an increasingly popular current of contemporary art which involves the use of biological (”living”) materials and employment of bioscientific procedures, protocols, and tools. This also means that bioartworks often result from the collaboration between artists and scientists. As any other form of tinkering with life in the frames of wet biology laboratory, bioartistic practices generate waste on a daily basis. It is not only laboratory materials, rubber gloves, or chemical substances that need to be disposed in accordance with lab protocols; the very life itself, the organisms, cells, tissues, bacteria, and all other forms of the living – once they “fulfil the ascribed role” – are to be disposed as well. In the latter case, yet, the “disposal” may also be understood as neutralisation or killing as the organisms cannot be sustained in the lab anymore (“are no longer useful”?), nor can they leave the lab. As the bioartists, Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts (Tissue Culture & Art Project) put it, “when life leaves the lab it is almost always waste”. In their own projects, which do not only consist in growing semi-living sculptures out of tissue cultures seeded on biopolymer scaffoldings of different shapes, but also include the involvement of the audience, TC&A draw attention to this very instrumental position which life itself occupies in the context of contemporary bioscience and technology. At the same time, both their artworks and narratives challenge the popular (transhumanist) discourse on manageability and control over life In this paper I will look at how the concept of the disposable/waste, which is increasingly problematised not only within environmental science, but also philosophy, sociology and cultural studies, may allow for a problematisation of life and the living entwined in the procedures constitutive of a bioartistic laboratory. Furthermore, whilst concentrating on the intertwinement between human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, living and non-living that all fall into the category of “life”, I will introduce the concept of the non/living as a more adequate and fruitful way of approaching this dynamic assemblage. Finally, I will inquire about possible ways in which the assemblage of the non/living may enable a rethinking of ethics in a non-anthropocentric manner.

Theoretically grounded in queer death studies and environmental humanities, thisarticle has a twofold aim. Firstly, it explores the somatechnics of environmentalviolence in the context of Northern and Eastern Europe, while paying attention toongoing ecocide inflicted by Russia on Ukraine, and to the post-WW2 chemicalweapon dumps in the Baltic Sea. Secondly, the article examines the concept of eco-grief in its close relation to artistic narratives on ecocide. By bridging the discussionon environmental violence and artistic renderings of eco-grief, the article hopes tocontribute to a better understanding of the socio-cultural responses to more-than-human death and loss, and their accompanying ethical imaginaries and affordances.

The processes and imaginaries of what is commonly framed as ‘the Anthropocene’ combine and expose the erasure, consumption, oppression, colonisation, and exploitation of different kinds of bodies: human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, individual and multiplicitous. Some of them are always already rendered ‘bare life’ or commodities to be consumed. While death as both an event and a process underpins the questions of the current environmental crisis and the accompanying cultural imaginaries, its understanding remains fashioned and arranged very much according to the conventional Western idea of the autonomous human subject. By bringing select philosophical perspectives and new-media/bioartworks into dialogue, this paper aims to focus on the possibilities of moving beyond the hegemony of the human, ‘deterritorialising’ death, and exploring ethical potentials such a deterritorialisation may open up.

Bioart is a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practices in contemporary art that involve the use of bio-materials (such as living cells, tissues, organisms) and scientific techniques, protocols, and tools. Bioart-works embody vulnerability (intrinsic to all beings) and depend on (bio)technologies that allow these creations to come into being, endure and flourish but also discipline them. This article focuses on ‘semi-living’ sculptures by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). TC&A’s artworks consist of bioengineered mammal tissues grown over biopolymer scaffoldings of different shapes and require sterile conditions of a bioreactor and constant care in order to survive. The article explores how bioart-works are always already intertwined with multiple (bio)technologies and techniques of care and labour, forming specific feminist technoecologies that challenge conventional bioscientific and cultural imaginaries of embodiment and the relation between physis and techné. TC&A’s sculptures expose life as the non/living: the processual enmeshment of the organic and inorganic, living and non-living, and growth and decay. The article argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart mobilises philosophical inventiveness: not only does it problematise the entwinement of technology and biomatter and of culture and nature, but it also prompts us to rethink the ontology of life.

In the times of climate change and planetary environmental disruption (or crises) that render certain habitats unliveable and contribute to socio-economic inequalities and vulnerabilities, death and loss (or more precisely, more-than-human death and loss) turn into urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020). In fact, after the recent IPCC report one might ask what kind of an understatement that phrasing is. Simultaneously, unsustainable living conditions contributing to the mortality of human and nonhuman individuals, destruction of entire ecosystems, loss of biodiversity and the sixth mass extinction evoke feelings of anxiety, anger and grief, manifested globally in popular-scientific narratives, cultural expressions, and environmental activism. 

In this paper I delve into crisis imaginaries linked to more-than-human death, dying and extinction, as well as questions of environmental grief, which the former are inherently entwined with. After unpacking the genealogy of the concept of environmental grief and its interlinked notions, I briefly sketch out the theoretical framework of Queer Death Studies, which this presentation is embedded in, and subsequently I look at several examples of contemporary bio-, eco-and media art that mobilise and – at times – subvert the notions of and mourning the more-than-human.

In the Western cultural imaginaries the monstrous is defined – following Aristotelian categorisations – by its excess, deficiency or displacement of organic matter. These characteristics come to the fore in the field of bioart: a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (various kinds of soma: cells, tissues, organisms), and scientific procedures, technologies, protocols, and tools. Bioartistic projects and objects not only challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, but also explore the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.

By looking at select bioartworks, this paper argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable, that is, as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. In this way, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.

Finally, while taking Deleuzian feminisms and new materialism as its theoretical ground, the paper suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

Keynote lecture delivered at the NOBA Norwegian Bioart Arena Symposium “Thinking through matter – Exploring BioArt and design in a Norwegian contemporary context”, 2 April 2019, Ås, Norway.

Bioartistic projects and objects both challenge the conventional ideas of embodiment and bodily boundaries, and problematise the relation between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, as well as various thresholds of the living.

By looking at select bioartworks, this lecture argues that the analysed projects offer a different ontology of life. More specifically, they expose life as uncontainable: as a power of differentiation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, and, ultimately, life and death. BY doing so, they draw attention to excess, processuality and multiplicity at the very core of life itself. Thus understood, life always already surpasses preconceived material and conceptual limits.

While taking feminist posthumanities as its theoretical ground, the lecture suggests that such a revision of the ontology of life may mobilise future conceptualisations of ethics that evade the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences.

paper asks about the ways to rethink death in its multiplicitous ecosophical relationality, processuality and materiality, beyond the structures of human exceptionalism that govern Western ontological, ethico-political and cultural renderings of both life and death. One of the avenues to do so is to engage with practices of eco-, bio- and body art, which themselves challenge the hegemonic position of the human subject and seek to unpack the life/death binary in the context of contemporary technoscience and environmental crises. Yet, in order to explore death as post-anthropocentric ecologies we need tools that may queer its conventional understandings. To paraphrase Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird, to ‘queer’ means to unhinge certainties and systematically disturb the familiar, ‘to undo normative entanglements and fashion alternative imaginaries’ beyond the exclusive concern with gender and sexuality (2008, 6). The task of queer theorising is a task of continuous self-reflection, of critique and the rendering visible of the ‘norm’.

This paper is set against the backdrop of the ways in which Western philosophy and cultural imaginaries comprehend death: either – following religious (yet often secularised) tradition – as a step towards afterlife, or – in a biomedical perspective – as something to be eliminated/worked against. Such a dual thinking about death is paralleled and simultaneously fortified by a strong division and hierarchy between the human subject and its nonhuman others characteristic of Western thought. These dualisms are, nonetheless, challenged by both theory and art emergent in the context of contemporary environmental crises, global climate change and ‘the sixth great extinction’. While employing feminist Deleuzian philosophy/queer vitalism and queer eco-criticism as my theoretical ground, I focus on the following questions: how do contemporary practices of bio/eco-art that deal with death and dying influence our understanding of death? What kind of conceptual/material queering do they mobilise? And finally, what does it mean to Death Studies?

“(…) the ability to mourn for the loss of other species is, in this sense, an expression of our sense of participation in and responsibility for the whole fabric of life of which we are a part.”(Burton-Christie 2011)

In the Anthropocene, death and loss become pressing environmental concerns. Destruction of ecosystems, loss of biodiversity, war, the Covid-19 pandemic and slow environmental violence evoke feelings of anxiety and grief, manifested in science and popular-scientific communication, art, theory and environmental activism. Recognising commonly unacknowledged grief and asking ourselves what it is that we mourn may help us understand our relations to the environment, and what we choose to value, preserve or revive.

Theoretically grounded in the transdisciplinary field of Queer Death Studies, this talk explores crisis imaginaries linked to more-than-human death, dying and extinction (both material and figurative), as well as questions of eco-grief, which the former are inherently entwined with. This is done through a close dialogue with select contemporary bio-, eco-and media artworks that mobilise and – at times – subvert the notions of and mourning the more-than-human. 

The ecological crises – often seen as a key component of the Anthropocene - render certain habitats unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and populations. While some indicate that the notion of the Anthropocene reinforces the hegemonic position and exceptionalism of the human subject, it also becomes evident that, in this context, the stories of species extinction and nonhuman death are profoundly entangled with the histories of colonial violence and elimination of the non-normative human other.

Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency, commonality and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between human and nonhuman animals, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. This split is paralleled by a dualistic approach to the human corpse itself: ‘dead’ matter is predominantly framed by either the secularised discourse on the sanctity and uniqueness of the dead body, or the narratives on its ‘abject’ character.

There is a lack of sufficient theorising of the messy intimacies between materialities of human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying. Our cultural understandings require narratives attentive to relationalities and entanglements of the living and non-living, and human and nonhuman, which I call ‘ecologies of death’.

By reading select contemporary eco-artworks and philosophical and scientific accounts on death in a more-than-human world through one another, this paper aims to explore and queer the ecologies and ontologies of death in the un/common world of the Anthropocene.

What does resurrection mean in the digital era and beyond religious associations or sentimentality? The virtual and the physical are more entangled than they may seem, blurring the boundaries between the living and the non-living, or further: the dead. The environmental cost of generative AI might be one example. But digital worlds also play a special role in the context of the question of death as such. Around 20 years into the existence of Myspace, Facebook, and other social media platforms, these spaces have been populated by profiles of people long gone. On the other hand, digitalized venues of remembrance multiply: from digital ‘tombstones’ in China, through various memorial websites (commemorating humans and their nonhuman companions alike), to digital transformation of photography in the practices of remembering, like in the case of “New Dimensions of Testimony” by the Shoah Foundation, which enables interaction with holograms of Holocaust survivors. Yet, human (mass) death is not the only one that ‘materializes’ digitally. The Anthropocene necropolitics is being fleshed out in many ways: the sixth mass species extinction, extractivist capitalism- and war-induced ecocide, pollution, toxicity, and slaughter for the sake of slaughter. The more-than-human worlds are dying. While finding new ways of staying with and caring for ‘terminally ill’ environments – to paraphrase queer-ecocritical scholar Sarah Ensor – is a must, there is also a need for cultural and affective ways of working with the actual or potential loss, for communities to partake in. This is where the digital meets the physical, once again. Following this intuition, the present talk will zoom in on new-media artworks, design projects, or digital sound archives that venture into the living/non-living interface by bringing back to ‘life’ – even if for a brief moment – that which in one way or another has been marked as ‘extinct.’ Some of the examples include: Tanja Vujinovic’s “Carboflora,” a virtual environment populated by the plants of the Carboniferous period; C-Lab’s “The Living Dead: On the Trail of a Female,” which uses a drone with a multispectral camera to search for a potential last remaining female specimen of the “Encephalartos woodii” cycad – a plant species that does not exist in the wild; or Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s “The Substitute,” dealing with the extinction of the northern white rhinoceros. What do such projects tell us about practices of remembrance? How are they linked to the de-extinction movement? What do they tell us about our relation to that (more-than-human) which is gone? And perhaps, even more importantly, to that (more-than-human) which is not gone yet? Where does the boundary between the living and non-living run – if there is still one? Who is at the center of digitalized resurrections? These are some of the questions this talk aims to tackle.

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and degradation, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals, populations and species extinction. While bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw dividing lines between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context ofdeath. On the one hand, death appears as a process common toall forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this paper explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of worksThe Absence of Alice (2008–2011) by Australian new-media andbioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the paper examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept ofdeath.