Transcorporeal Witnessing: Re-Figuring Toxic Entanglements Through the Arts

Abstract

This article seeks to extend discourses of embodiment by deploying Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality in the context of our grappling with complexities of bearing witness to deforestation and ecological destruction in Alberta’s Tar Sands. Transcorporeality captures senses of porosity among human, nonhuman, and more-than-human bodies and constitutes a productive perspective from which to ethically engage with ecological destruction. Through our artwork and dialogic exchange with each other, and our embodied thinking with the works of other artists and scholars concerned with ecological atrocity, we attend to challenges, nuances, and possibilities of witnessing in ways that both attune to our embodiment and seek to decenter the human. We contend that arts-based practices of being, knowing, and doing offer openings for re-figuring the toxic entanglements that pervade current ecological relations and illustrating pathways toward more regenerative futures.