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

Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula

Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans. Download Accessible PDF

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

Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula

References

Baldwin, Ransom L. and Erin E. Connor. 2017. ‘Rumen Function and Development’, Veterinary Clinics of North America: Food Animal Practice, 33: 427–39, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cvfa.2017.06.001>[accessed 1 May 2024]

Barad, Karen. 2017. Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press)

Bellacasa, Maria Puig de la. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds (London: University of Minnesota Press)

Blum, Winfried E.H. and others. 2019. ‘Does Soil Contribute to the Human Gut Microbiome?’ Microorganisms, 7: 287, <https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms7090287> [accessed 1 June 2024]

Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity)

Bravo, Javier and others. 2011. ‘Ingestion of Lactobacillus Strain Regulates Emotional Behavior and Central GABA Receptor Expression in a Mouse via the Vagus Nerve’, PNAS, 108: 16050–55 <https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1102999108> [accessed 1 June 2024]

Brives, Charlotte, Matthäus Rest, and Salla Sariola (eds). 2021. With Microbes (Mattering Press)

Coulter, Kendra. 2016. ‘Beyond Human to Humane: A Multispecies Analysis of Care Work, its Repression, and its Potential’, in Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care, and Social Justice, ed. by Alana Cattapan and others, special issue of Studies in Social Justice, 10.2: 199–219, <https://journals.library.brocku.ca/index.php/SSJ/issue/view/88> [accessed 1 June 2024]

CSSM (Center of the Social Study of Microbes) website, <https://www.socialmicrobes.org/> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, transl. and foreword by Brian Massumi, repr. 2004 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press)

Dinan, T.G., and J.F. Cryan. 2013. ‘Melancholic Microbes: A Link Between Gut Microbiota and Depression?’ Neurogastroenterology and Motility, 25: 713–19, <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nmo.12198>[accessed 1 May 2024]

Forsythe, P., W. Kunze, and J. Bienenstock. 2016. ‘Moody Microbes or Fecal Phrenology: What do we Know about the Microbiota–Gut–Brain Axis?’ BMC Medicine, 14.58, <https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-016-0604-8> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Gilbert, Scott and Salla Sariola. 2020. ‘Toward a Symbiotic Perspective on Public Health: Recognizing the Ambivalence of Microbes in the Anthropocene’, Microorganisms, 8: 756, <https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/8/5/746> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Haas-Neill, Sandor and Paul Forsythe. 2020. ‘A Budding Relationship: Bacterial Extracellular Vesicles in the Microbiota–Gut–Brain Axis’, International Journal of Molecular Sciences 21: 8899, <https://doi.org/10.3390/ijms21238899> [accessed 26 October 2024]

Haahtela, Tari. 2019. ‘Biodiversity Hypothesis’, Allergy: European Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, 74: 1445–56, <https://doi.org/10.1111/all.13763> [accessed 26 October 2024]

Hakala, Outimaija. 2022. ‘Yhteenkietoutumia. Kuvataiteen Eläineettisiä Kysymyksiä. Yrityksiä Ottaa Eläin Huomioon Taiteellisessa Työssä.’ Tahiti Journal. <https://tahiti.journal.fi/article/view/122086> [accessed 20 November 2024]

Hannula, Riina. 2022. ‘Agential Guts’. Exhibition at SOLU, Helsinki, Finland <https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/solu/activities/m-slash-other-becomings-exhibition-i> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet (Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press)

Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2016)

Hauser, Jens. 2022. ‘Toward a “Bacterial Turn” in Art, Architecture, and Design’, CCCBLAB Cultural Research and Innovation

Kowalski, Kurt and others. 2015. ‘Advancing the Science of Microbial Symbiosis to Support Invasive Species Management: A Case Study on Phragmites in the Great Lakes’, Frontiers in Microbiology, 6 <https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2015.00095> [accessed 26 October 2024]

Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime (Cambridge: Polity)

Leinovirtanen, Oona. 2022. ‘Earth is a Collection of Abilities’. Exhibition at B-Galleria, Turku, Finland, <https://bgalleria.net/post/700621702999244800/oona-leinovirtanen-maa-on-kykyjen-kokoelma> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Lorimer, Jamie. 2020. Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (Minneapolis, MN and London, UK: University of Minnesota Press)

Massumi, Brian. 2014. What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press)

McFall-Ngai, Margaret and others. 2013. ‘Animals in a Bacterial World: A New Imperative for the Life Sciences’, PNAS, 110: 3229–36 <https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1218525110> [accessed 26 October 2024]

Mitman, Gregg. 2019. ‘Reflections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing’, Edge Effects, <https://edgeeffects.net/haraway-tsing-plantationocene/> [accessed 1 May 2024]

‘m/other becomings’. 2022. Symposium held 9–10 June at Aalto Design Factory, Finland, <https://bioartsociety.fi/projects/m-slash-other-becomings/activities/m-slash-other-becomings-symposium> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Multispecies Salon. nd. Rural Alchemy Workshop (R.A.W.), <https://www.multispecies-salon.org/bolender/> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Sgritta, M. and others. 2019. ‘Mechanisms Underlying Microbial-Mediated Changes in Social Behavior in Mouse Models of Autism Spectrum Disorder’, Neuron, 101: 246–59.e6, <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.11.018> [accessed 26 October 2024]

Sutela, Jenna. 2017. ‘Orkut’. Exhibition at Titanik-galleria, Turku, Finland, <http://www.titanik.fi/jenna-sutela-orkut-19-5-11-6-2017/> [accessed 1 May 2024]

Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

Tsing, Anna. 2017. ‘A Threat to Holocene Resurgence Is a Threat to Livability’, in The Anthropology of Sustainability: Beyond Development and Progress, ed. by Marc Brightman and Jerome Lewis (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 51–65.

❮ 5 Conclusions

Tip

Tip