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

Riina Maaria Hentriika Hannula

Sculpture-like materials that were left from goats secreting and excreting were exhibited in SOLU / Bioart Society gallery in Helsinki, within the project called ‘m/other becomings’ (2022). This exposition and the artworks would have not been possible without the co-production with goats. The Gaia story of Agential Guts took different forms. In pink textile works, I wanted to approach the visceral feeling of guts. Other elements were objects that emerged from the matters of care, out of faecal pellets, salt stones, and branches gnawed by goats. The story was also told in the form of a video essay. Proposing that we collaborated with goats was overshadowed by human animals having more agency over other animals, and I cannot—and do not wish to—deny that asymmetry or any other asymmetries of the assemblage. This staying with a trouble, as Haraway (2016) famously formulates, led to further thinking about what care, creativity, and collaboration might mean in the post-anthropocentric context.

What my project in all dimensions tried to achieve were conditions that could materialise the affirmative branch of posthumanism. This stand is already imagining and dreaming of creating better situations for more-than-human coexistence instead of criticising human-centred attitudes that are inherited from enlightenment and humanism (Braidotti 2013: 37–54). Affirmative posthumanism is imaginative and joyful, being well suited for artistic aspirations: ‘By transposing us beyond the confines of bound identities, art becomes necessarily inhuman in the sense of non-human in that it connects to the animal, the vegetable, earthy and planetary forces that surround us’ (Braidotti 2013: 107). Rearranging the connections embedded in the works like Hatching Goat Microbes embeds the process of kin-making; we were lateral relatives connected via our microbiome (Haraway 2016: 103).

Moving around with goats and collecting materials was part of the daily practices of care where the aesthetic choices were made on the go, almost as if they were not my choices but aesthetico-political choices; animal politics (Massumi 2014). The shaky camera and unfocused frames hint at the emergence of ethnographic situations that were sudden and directed by unruly turns of events. Breaks in character, where the human sometimes performed and then became a caretaker more casually, also referred to the possibility of changes in subjectivity, eco-philosophically constituted by multiple relatings (Braidotti 2013: 49). We had to cross the monoculture fields to reach the forest. It felt stunning to belong to this cluster, where we were glued together by our sensory, affective, and material belonging. I felt like goats were inviting me to revolt against the plantationocene. Trekking in the forest was a way to get to know my companion goats in a way that allowed them to make collective choices of where to turn, and when it was time to return home. Their fierce looks were unforgettable when they entered the forest, rewilding us all.
 

My human body or my creativity were not separated from the rest of nature and the other-than-human bodies and their abilities. My actions formed a relational bundle via a caring assemblage glued together by perhaps Lactobacillus reuteri or rhamnosus or other strains. Having Lactobacilli or other microbes as our directors released nonhumans from their passive or mechanistic status (Braidotti 2013).
 

‘But was it me or Lactobacillus […] who was the caretaker of the situation?’ I asked in the video essay titled G.O.A.T. (2022), seen in excerpt 2. Speculating about exchanging microbial companions, I address the agency of Lactobacilli through the process of milking a goat and fermentation of yogurt; practices that in industrial settings have become more than problematic. Microbes participate in the labour of care, especially different strains of Lactobacilli, which have earned a ‘good bug’ title as they inhibit pathogenic microorganisms wherever they metabolise and help to conserve aliment via fermenting.
 

I ended up including yogurt as one of the topics of G.O.A.T. (2022), excerpt 2, but I only talked about the fermenting process, and filmed snow instead. I did not wish to continue milking the goats, because it felt like choosing to align with the more instrumental approach practised in exploitative industrial settings. Getting manure for the garden as a side product felt more in line with the circulating matters, without taking advantage of the goats that kept producing milk after breastfeeding their offspring. Lactobacilli appear to act in advantageous ways wherever they abide, be it fermenting, composting, or inhabiting the gut, and signalling with the brain. Yet, I want to underline that more important than stating which microbes benefit guts and soils is to acknowledge the multiplicity of multi-species assemblages that make up the holobiont in its complexity in uncontrollable and wild ways.

2.2 The Creativity as the Basis of Animal Politics

Making art together with goats was a constant dialogue with cultural and critical animal studies that stress the demand for special moral care and responsibility of sentient beings (Hakala 2022). In those settings, microbes and, for example, plants are considered less animated for a reason. Agential Guts hopes to add an ecologically attuned way of making space for ethical coexistence with an emphasis on the ethically sustainable caring practices of companion animals like goats, yet insisting on how biodiversity and the existence of the microbial realm should be embedded in these responsibilities.
 

Abundance meant biodiversity, not surplus. Goats were kin, not livestock. The goal was to design caring practices that could be more sustainable for both these animals and the ecologies within which we were living while rewilding the artistic practice as well. Massumi (2014) shows the way in combining these endeavours by looking at sympathy, playfulness, and creativity at a same glance. Agential Guts interprets this by introducing speculative ethics of care to animal politics by creating a caring standpoint, where thinking is not just epistemic stance but opens space for new meaning (Bellacasa 2017: 59). The care as a speculative ethics became a form of playfulness bridging the gap between species by creating space for rearranging our relations. The video essay G.O.A.T. was initiated by trying to experience microbial agency in our caring relations, as in excerpt 4. Individual microbes are invisible and can be looked at only with microscopes. The speculative and playful gesture of the project was also still trying to detect them with bare eyes, perhaps from the radically relational Gaian position, to play with the impossible and maybe see something indiscernible. Thus, the artistic exposition was not a side product of the ethnographic method or illustration for theories, but a natural urge within our matters to be playful.
 

In G.O.A.T. excerpt 3, the goat’s faecal pellets play a big role. They work as an entrance, opening the speculative and material door to the future as they activate soil microbes that live in symbiosis with the plants (Lorimer 2020: 48). I weaved faecal pellets in the installations of Agential Guts. Multi-species Care (2022) is an attempt to rethink relationalities between guts, wood material gnawed by goats, their faecal matter, and gut-like pillows that try to evade the dichotomies of inside and outside, exposing the guts as tactile soft objects. A human is hugging a goatling in a print sewn into one of the pillows, directing attention toward the interspecies affectivity.
 

Small-scale, mutually inclusive, symbiotic messiness was juxtaposed with the exploitative and rigid practices of the plantationocene that are far from playful. We were surrounded by the homogenous region of wheat, which was governed by soil turning that destroys the fungi. The soil’s capacity to provide yields was sustained with artificial fertilisers, and sprayed with pesticides to control various pests and disease carriers, and glyphosate to kill certain weeds and grasses. Sadly, mono-crop farming ensures that no other species would survive alongside the cultivated species. To provide an alternative to the practices that deplete soil, I wanted to pay attention to the co-enactment of the guts. Making our mammalian, soil, and plant bodies assembled and not separated, I emphasised the care within the metabolic, composting, and transformative processes that life is dependent on.

Committed to the practices of care, Agential Guts was rethinking and imagining nonhuman artistic and caring labour, and looking at the agency of our gut microbiome from that perspective. Care in Agential Guts was maintenance work that embraced microbial exposure. It was also creating a condition where the processing of different materials by goats became art. Thus, care and the artistic process were enmeshed, as they both required attentiveness toward nonhumans in the project and allowance for goats and their rumen companions to do what they desired to do. 

What was central in the standpoint we created with goats was to notice how not only my imagination but also my becoming-with goats drew the basis for creativity; the material was not reduced to passive substances acted upon by humans. In this speculative manner, I made claims like ‘cuteness is a microbial wish to make species that need to exchange microbes very desirable to each other’ (G.O.A.T. 2022). Pushing microbial agency to the fore, Agential Guts allowed multi-species relationality to be imagined and further diffracted. Without just implicitly adopting new facts about microbiomes, this fieldwork launched a standpoint for feeling and creating with science and the agents that the sciences represent.

Many of the artworks in the exhibition were something that companion species had ‘designed’ mostly by their metabolic processes, which in one way or another involved microbial desire: the aesthetics that mouths, guts, and microbes transform reveal the vital play of matters as symbiotic sympathy. Cattle manure nourishes plants by activating soil microbiota, which in turn makes plants grow better. Soil works as a carbon sink when the fungi and bacteria make the soil a living entity, but with traditional farming carbon to nitrogen cycles become dysfunctional. We spread compost in our garden and covered the soil with mulch, selected companion plants, and used compost teas to enable microbial activity inside the soil.