Labor

Abstract

The post-anthropocentric body serves as host to a myriad of flows, forces, metabolisms, behaviours and perhaps performances. ‘Our’ microbiota, the microbes that live upon or within ‘our’ human tissues and fluids, orchestrate these activities. The work of such non-human agents living as ‘micro performers’ on the human epidermis is the focus of my artwork, Labor. Labor is a dynamic, multi-sensory art installation that endeavours to re-create the scent of human exertion. There are, however, no people involved in making the smell – it is created by bacteria propagating in the three large bioreactors in the artwork. Each bioreactor incubates a species of human skin bacteria responsible for the primary scent of sweating bodies. Human sweat in itself is odourless: it is these bacteria feeding upon the components of ‘our’ sweat that creates volatile, odiferous chemical compounds that ‘we’ associate with sweat and physical effort. Labor reflects upon ‘our’ changing understanding of what ‘we’ are. Microbes in and on the human body vastly outnumber human cells and help regulate many of ‘our’ bodily processes, from digestion and immunity to emotional and physiological responses, like sweating. ‘Our’ microbiota is integral to who and what ‘we’ are, and complicates any simplistic sense of (an indivisible) self. Likewise, the smell of the perspiring body is not just a human scent, unless ‘we’ are willing to redefine what ‘we’ mean by human. Whereas a traditional, anthropocentric worldview considers all activities of, on and within the human body as unified human activities, a contemporary, post-anthropocentric perspective suggests that humans are not only hosts to other organisms, but that these are collaborative, symbiotic agents of ‘our’ human identity. The artistic research carried out and its resulting artwork Labor charts how coordinated microbial performances across the human epidermis undermine any simplistic sense of a unified, rational, human self.