Agential Guts — Care and Creativity within the Messy Multi-species Assemblage

Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula

Agential Guts was a multi-species practice of care in a rural area southwest of Finland in 2020–22. Messy and affective entanglement of kin-making with goats revealed creativity of vital matters and rendered companion animals as collaborators. This exposition manifests the circulation of matters materialising premises of posthumanist and relational thought within activities, such as gardening or taking care of other animals, and the microbial leakage therein. Art-based research facilitated situations where becoming Earthbound was a commitment to entangle with the ‘complex systemic phenomenon that composes a living planet’ (Haraway 2016: 43). Following the breaking of the habit of the nature–culture binary that separates humans from the rest of beings, this Earthbound position proposes that Gaia is not an alternative for ‘nature’ but a responsibility toward a planet, a relation. From that relational stand, Agential Guts created material conditions for telling what Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway call Gaia stories, stories beyond anthropocentrism (Haraway 2016: 41–43).
 

The story, which is also to be followed in ethnographic vignettes describing the fieldwork, is grounded in my multi-species home. It is a site where the material compositions of the artworks are implemented. I had been living in the countryside for about ten years, to have a garden and foraging access to wild plants, berries, and mushrooms, and to learn about the co-dependence of ecosystems in practice. During these years, our home became populated with other animals that had been abandoned. I had embedded collaboration with the more-than-human world already for years in my artistic practice. The affective, material, and messy events depict the entanglements that enabled empirical, embodied evidence to be brought forth from the encounters. These fieldnotes are found hovering from some of the images of this exposition. The notes demonstrate how instead of treating other animals, microbes, or soils and their metabolic processes as a (passive) matter or instrumentalising them as a medium for art, we were affective animals to animals, sympathetic matter to matter to each other. Affect is here treated in a new materialist configuration, where it is not reduced to categorical feelings but rather unravels the impact between bodies and things toward leaky compositions (Massumi 2014). The goal was to cultivate sensitivity and attentiveness toward especially sentient beings such as goats but also to emphasise the biodiverse composition that potentially enhances living conditions for all.
 

As Anna Tsing proposes, collaboration also means contamination (Tsing 2015). Proximity between different bodies spawned biodiverse flourishing; microbes were not inhibited from leaking between actors. Excerpt 1 from the video essay G.O.A.T. (2022) depicts the intimate relations of care assembled by human and more-than-human agencies. The human is soil that grows plants, and the goats are munching this human. Agential Guts wanted to look for nonconventional methods for contaminating–collaborating to produce a novel understanding and practice of care that is generated by distributed agencies. Justification for collaboration coincides with an affirmative posthumanist standpoint moving beyond the dominant human subject position. It requires new modes of relations to dismantle a long history of human exceptionalism that keeps providing excuses for exploiting and instrumentalising other species (Braidotti 2013.) Thus, Agential Guts became an attempt to open space for new ways of relating with nonhuman kin that ‘needs to be explored as an open experiment, not as a foregone moral conclusion about allegedly universal values or qualities’ (Braidotti 2013: 80).

The exposition moves around the different sides of the project to gather all the different sensitivities that living in a multi-species arrangement and practising art as multi-species care required. Care was an approach, a practice, and an objective to subsequently generate new modes of care. Agential Guts’ distinctive characteristics were to centre multi-species artistic practice around notions of more-than-human care. Drawing from Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), I approached a more-than-human collaboration and care beyond a productionist manner. Investigating and being involved with overlooked actors and practices formed an ethical baseline for the project to deteriorate a productionist ethos that has reduced the definition of care for the objectives of industries (Bellacasa 2017: 186). Agential Guts aimed to conduct a multi-species practice of care committed to maintaining and creating situations where care would precisely be developed and practised, to the contrary of industrial ends and means.
 

Agential Guts diverged from ethically problematic but normative and traditional conceptualisations and concepts of care, especially multi-species exploitations that are misleadingly considered care practices. Seriously acknowledging nonhuman animals as sentient beings, we need to recognise them as performing various labours of care in industrial settings, where the care the other species conduct is repressed (Coulter 2016.) The way multi-species is reconfigured is manifested in the video excerpts of G.O.A.T. (2022) in the ways I wish to present our entanglement from the perspective of Gaia as animal politics: ‘Politics of performative gestures […] and participative art in the wild’ (Massumi 2014: 40).
 

Another aspect of care in Agential Guts was to generate definitions for care, based on the facts of microbial companions that change the perception of each body in the assemblage. Locating this project in our guts enabled rethinking about how to acknowledge the whole assemblage and not just humans. This was possible only through the situated and material practice of care with companion critters. The recognition of more-than-human agencies of care leads to the dimension of the project; the artistic production with companion critters, which were not just mammalian bodies but also microbial bodies in between. My baseline as an artist was to expose my sensing, thinking body to other species, and a Gaia story emerged from this co-enactment.

I position myself within the emerging field of the social study of microbes that invents novel methods to make sense of how microbes impact societal life (CSSM, Centre for the Social Study of Microbes, website). Scientific understanding altogether underlies our relations with species we cannot sense ourselves, especially with what Haraway calls ‘companion critters’ that fold ‘inside each other’s tubes’ (Haraway 2016: 98). Thus, Agential Guts looks not only at our human and nonhuman agencies but also at how technoscience enacts these more-than-human assemblages (Barad 2007). Art-based knowledge production in Agential Guts elaborates methods and theories of the social study of microbes. The project contributes to this field by offering embodied, situated, and partial sense-making, where knowing is co-enactment with the species we wish to understand (Brives, Rest, and Sariola 2021).
 

The project leaned on the facts stating that symbiotic bacteria, which we also receive from ecologies outside our bodies, are critical for health and maintenance. As microbiomes affect immunity (McFall-Ngai and others 2013), mood (Dinan and Cryan 2013), cognition, and even social behaviour (Forsythe, Kunz, and Bienenstock 2016; Sgritta and others 2019), it is no longer possible to dispute the influence of microbes even within our thinking-feeling (Haraway 2016: 61). The impact of gut microbiota on brain function and behaviour is shown in a number of studies. Certain gut bacteria produce metabolites, including neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, and GABA (Haas-Neill and Forsythe 2020.) Could Lactobacilli signalling with our mammalian brain, affecting behaviour and mood (Forsythe, Kunz, and Bienenstock 2016), be seen as an affective factor in something other than a biologically reductionist way? The baseline is to make space for imagining these microbial agencies and desires beyond intentionality reserved for human subjects (Barad 2007: 177), and mechanistic takes on human and nonhuman bodies (Braidotti 2013). What if we could assemble in a way that does not repress the care work of other species, whether it is mammalian or microbial, but supports ‘interspecies solidarity as an idea, a goal, an ethical commitment’? (Coulter 2016: 212).

We have entered into a holobiont paradigm knowing that the anatomy, development, immunity, and physiology of mammalian bodies are constituted with microbes (Gilbert and Sariola 2020). Instead of individual bodies, we form symbiotic assemblages at whatever scale, and all of us players are symbionts to each other (Haraway 2016). Ecological studies with different species’ microbiomes show that all organisms’ adaptive capacities can be linked in various ways to their microbiomes (Kowalski and others 2015). Agential Guts’ messy entanglement expanded from mammalian bodies to soil and its microbiome, taking note of how soil microbiota also contributes to health (Blum and others 2019). Ruminants in particular, who evolved by fermenting grass and grains with gut bacteria (Baldwin and Connor 2017), show us how we have always become together with microbes in earthly symbiosis (Haraway 2016.) Furthermore, living close to ‘natural environments’ creates microbially saturated milieus that enhance our immune system, as the biodiversity hypothesis demonstrates: ‘Biodiversity hypothesis states that contact with natural environments enriches the human microbiome, promotes immune balance, and protects from allergy and inflammatory disorders’ (Haahtela 2019). Concepts like biodiversity hypothesis create new meaning for the relationships between humans and other species. Agential Guts aimed to evade centring the meaning of biodiversity and multi-species care to human health by returning to the unruly nature of the microbial leaky agency. Why these paradigm shifts matter is that symbiosis is threatened by modernity as humans have removed themselves from nature and are domesticating and managing other species industrially (Gilbert and Sariola 2020). Ecological studies have shown intensive and antibiotic methods for managing plantations or factory farms, creating conditions for invasive and pathogenic species to proliferate (Lorimer 2020: 71).

The most crucial factor in the new paradigm that can be called the microbial or bacterial turn is that the ‘symbiotic networks of the human holobiont are enmeshed in larger symbiotic networks that sustain the planet’ (Gilbert and Sariola 2020). Thus, the multi-species care in this project was situated on rewilding and saturating the microbiome of soils, plants, and our mammalian bodies in planetary sympathy. The whole assemblage was believed to become more resilient, saturated, and able to resist invasive species this way (Lorimer 2020). We concur with what Anna Tsing aptly formulates: ‘Meaningful sustainability requires multi-species resurgence, that is, the remaking of livable landscapes through the actions of many organisms’ (Tsing 2017: 51). A conversation between Tsing and Haraway (Mitman 2019) introduces the concept of the plantationocene. In the plantationocene, crops are growing in homogenous masses of clone-like groups, producing surplus by the proliferation of species on demand. Removing other plant species and devastating soil to the degree that no microorganisms can survive the plantationocene creates ecological simplifications profiting from the extractive harnessing of humans and other species (Mitman 2019.) By acknowledging the complexity and messiness of the whole assemblage, the material dimension of our practice went beyond the violence of monocultural processes that instrumentalise species, isolate objects, and treat them separately from their environments.

I remark that our kin-making with the objectives of creating diversity enters into conversation with regenerative farming and rewilding practices and could be seen as belonging to the ‘dirty governmentalities’ described by Jamie Lorimer (2020). The probiotic discourse around microbiomes closely whirls around encounters with agricultural animals, soil, raw and fermented foods managing life with probiotic modes instead of vigilant control over specific pathogens. Besides enhancing the biodiversity in larger scales, exposure to certain bacteria or even parasites like helminths is allowed, or even desirable, to gain better immunity (Lorimer 2020). Human health, agency, and intentions quickly penetrate new conceptions. Agential Guts agency is shared, processual, and distributed. Leaking to escape individual bodies. Enacting rewilding as an aesthetic and creative multi-species arrangement, I ask: what type of definitions and practices of care emerge when reconfiguring collaboration as contamination in art-based practice? 

Agential Guts is grounded in contemporary artistic practices that curator Jens Hauser (2022) has dubbed a bacterial turn in art. The artistic work within this scene is usually explicitly post-anthropocentric, as in collaborations with real living materials within bio-art in general. Similarly to the probiotic turn, the trend is to envision how to collaborate with microorganisms. The curiosities I align via Agential Guts are found in different kinds of work with microbes, other critters, or both. What unites these practices is that they all have an approach that gives an actively participatory role to nonhuman species. My first encounter with nonhumans directing an art project was with a brainless protozoan, in the work by leading artist Jenna Sutela (2017). Orkut, in collaboration with the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, led Sutela toward unknown results (to a laboratory in Japan, for instance). Karin Bolender’s ongoing project The Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.) is not scripted artwork but stems from worlding with a companion donkey. Bolender was literally led to backyards and offroads by their donkey, since 2002 ‘negotiating between human logos and other embodied ways of being and knowing’ (Multispecies Salon, n.d.). Through this ongoing practice, Bolender has produced different artworks and touched upon the microbial agency of a donkey’s belly, for instance, in Gut Sounds Lullaby (2010–12).

I feel an affinity to the works of artists who have other animals in their art in ways that can be called animal politics, as they are playful gestures in sympathetic collaboration. I feel a connection with the objectives that are found in the compassionate artistic research of Outimaija Hakala (2022). Her work does not predicate the bacterial turn but stems from critical animal studies and explores the problematics of representing other animals in art. Through artistic human and dog collaborations, Hakala strives to create room for just ways of conducting artistic work with a companion dog. Hakala demands more compassioned relations toward other animals, emphasising their experience and feelings. In their human–dog collaboration, Hakala discovered Snejka tending to paint, and let her companion dog be seen as a fully active agent when Snejka’s paintings were presented alongside human artists’ works in exhibitions (Hakala 2022).
 

My close colleague in the social study of microbes and art-based research on human–microbial relations, Oona Leinovirtanen, with whom I collaborate (to the degree we do not know where one’s ideas end and the other’s begins) has a practice that approaches microbial companionship in corporeal and imaginative ways that expand our sensibilities on microbial worlds. In her exhibition Earth is a Collection of Abilities (2022), she shared a microbial milieu with a mole who is a competitor but also a kin in her gardening practice. More importantly, the mole was directing her perception beneath the ground, where it lived with microbes and larvae (Leinovirtanen 2022). Collaboration with Leinovirtanen took a speculative form when we were artists in residence in Kilpisjärvi while a group from the social study of microbes led by Sariola was writing chapters for With Microbes (Brives, Rest, and Sariola 2021). We utilised the laboratory at Kilpisjärvi biological station to make a magical prediction out of the scholar’s microbial samples. As artists, we can push the limits of the meaning of biological matter and its technoscientific enactments.