Trans-corporeality, as a theoretical site, is where corporeal theories, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways. Furthermore, the movement across human corporeality and nonhuman nature necessitates rich, complex modes of analysis that travel through the entangled territories of material and discursive, natural and cultural, biological and textual.¹

American literary scholar and ecocultural theorist Stacy Alaimo’ s term “transcorporeality” redefines the relationship between humans, technology, and the environment as the fluidity among materials. It breaks away from human-imposed dichotomies and supposes the interconnection, interaction, and intertwinement between the human and nonhuman bodies. Based on the transversality of materials, ARKO Art Center’s multidisciplinary arts festival Nothing Makes Itself² deviates from some of the ideological conflicts between technological progress and environment conservation and introduces a future of virtuous cycle—where humans, technology, and the environment become one organic union and must live in symbiosis. This stance stays away from allowing the dystopian views of the climate crisis era, interlocked with the image of apocalyptic earth reinstated to a great extent, to simply accept the unity of nature and humans with the shared fate as the justification for all the disastrous phenomena and their causes. In other words, it aims to resist separating itself from the mechanism of fluid interconnections between humans and nature and simply observing the current situation from a particular field or point of view. The festival looks beyond the symbolic images hanging over modern society and pays attention to each individual’s life and burden of reality.

It does so while disrupting the cognitive frame of human-nature division to acknowledge diverse principles, which have been overlooked in human history. Furthermore, it focuses on the values represented in art with more diversified introspections and voices to rebuild the connection between humans, technology, and the environment.

Works produced with support from The Danish Arts Foundation

NOTHINGMAKESITSELF.ART

ARKO, Art Council Korea, Seoul, 2021

With support from The Danish Arts Foundation