Situated Bioart: The Argentine Contemporary Scene and the Anthropocene

Hybrid: In person and on Zoom

In 1998 the first manifesto was published that established an artistic category for visual poetics that addressed the manipulation of the living: Transgenic Art (Eduardo Kac, Leonardo MIT Magazine). The main characteristic of these works was the collaborative production of living works between artists and scientists in biotechnology laboratories. Several decades later we can recognize the consolidation of a genre with particular sets of appropriations. For example, in countries like Argentina the impact of this type of work generated the creation of specialized institutions for artistic training, scholarships, awards and an art system permeable to experimentation with the living. Since 2008, when the first Latin American bio-art laboratory was created in the city of Buenos Aires, new aesthetics have begun to unfold, some of them in conflict with mainstream logics. A situated gaze appears in circulation from the global south that is in dialogue with what is happening in other parts of the planet and which engages with the critical background established by the concept of Anthropocene.

Biographies:

Lucía Stubrin (UNER, Argentina) has a PhD in Theory and History of the Arts (Universidad de Buenos Aires) and a degree in Social Communication (Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos). Author of the book Bioarte. Poéticas de lo viviente (2020) (EUDEBA-EDUNL). Director of the Study Group Biosemiotics, Art and Technique (UNER), Professor of Semiotics (UNER) and Epistemology of Visual Arts (UNL). Professor and research fellow at Universidad de Barcelona. She was postdoctoral fellow of the Fundación Carolina at the Universidad de Salamanca, an Eramus Mundus doctoral fellow at the Université de Strasbourg and a doctoral and postdoctoral fellow of CONICET at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She has published in national and international journals, editions and curatorial work in public museums and private galleries. Her area of research is the art-science-technology problematic with special emphasis on life sciences and bio-art.

Professor Deborah Martin is a Latin American film studies scholar and has published 3 monographs and a co-edited collection on topics including Latin American women’s filmmaking, and the child in Latin American film. She is currently researching the role of film and visual culture in Latin American environmental justice activism.

Dr Emily Baker is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Latin American Studies at UCL. She analyses and theorises the way cultural producers re-cast historical, contemporary or future events in fiction, whether that be war, climate change, romance or revolution. In that vein, she is the author of Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Latin American Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2022).