Vita · Necro · Vita translates to Life · Death ·Life, in a blending of Latin and Greek, which points towards Humanism’s eurocentric roots in roman and greek traditions, that has defined a certain understanding of what being human is, and what life is. Each work in the series includes a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY) which evolves over the course of the exhibition - drying, dying, oxidising, expanding and transforming. Focusing on the intra-action with industrial materials and its ecosystem, the work series speculates a future in which biology, industry and technology meet and work together. A renegotiation of what can be understood as life, asks us to reconfigure both a human-nature-inhuman continuum as well as a Life-death continuum. Rather than an anthropocentric overemphasis on mortality and perishability, the work series emphasizes death’s relentlessly generative force as a part of life. The series Vita.Necro.Vita asks us to think with, and not against death  towards an entangled future. 

The variations within the series includes a flag in which the SCOBY becomes pigmented to black over time as it is raised and lowered into water as oxidation by the metal continues, pointing towards a new entangled future, a video installation work in which a SCOBY is draped over collapsed scaffolding that begins to take on its form and markings as it dies, whilst a video shows its early becoming as the symbiosis begins to form the membrane and a dried SCOBY pressed between glass exploring the future of biomaterials.  ·

‘Death is the inhuman conceptual excess: the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, and the unproductive black hole that we all fear. Yet death is also a creative synthesis of flows, energies and perpetual becoming'

- Rosi Braidotti

Series of installation works

Symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast, various supporting materials. 

Various dimensions

2019-2022