Contaminating stories: materialities and deanthropic representations

Abstract

In the Latin American art field, especially through artistic practices located in the connection between science, technology, and art, there seems to be a search for twists, breaks, and revisions of traditional ways based on Western and hegemonic historical aesthetic frameworks. In this sense, this article reflects on the notion of representation understood as a narrative, of contamination by appealing to theoretical conceptualizations of authors such as Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, and Tim Ingold, and of materiality, matter/body as an actant with the possibility of agency, using Luciana Paoletti’s portraits as counter-representational images located in a de-anthropic line. The Argentinean artist and biotechnologist, through her portraits made with microorganisms and bacteria, promotes a rupture with the anthropocentric canon, from the materiality of the non-human life she extracts from bodies, sustained from the image of man, fostering the exercise of dissidence. Appealing to Haraway’s notion of sympoiesis, practicing the generate-with in the crop, these portraits reveal the possibilities of counter-likeness and anti-similarity as sparkles of corporeality and a human and non-human materiality on the margins of the canonical art history and representation advocating for a revolt of the lines that draw the narratives in art.