Agential Guts provided speculative ‘visions that “cut” differently’ (Bellacasa 2017: 61; Barad 2007). It was an attempt to generate Gaian vision, beyond a nowhere position or universal eagle-eye vision. On the contrary, a Gaian standpoint is a situated and partial perspective, grounded in planetary desires and sensitivities. For Haraway and Latour, the meaning of Gaia is not a totalised planet or mythical entity, not even a superorganism, but ‘an injunction to rematerialise our belonging to the world’ (Latour 2017: 217). Making new meaning for care through Earthbound actions with goats, the ethnographic fieldwork resulted in the Agential Guts exhibition at SOLU gallery and this exposition that became a Gaia story. All agents, from goats to soils and microbes leaking between, were assembled as caretakers of biodiverse situations in playful ways. Broadening the methods and theoretical underpinnings of thinking about the societal meaning of microbial agents and assemblages, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and the social study of microbes.
Informed by a natural scientific understanding of microorganisms, we co-enacted microbial materiality in an embodied and affective way. Speculating alongside the facts, the sympoietic account acknowledged that microbially designated assemblages conduct care work beyond human comprehension, balancing the ecosystem. Trying to push the limits of what multi-species care might mean, Agential Guts enabled rethinking of the agencies of the material bodies of the assemblage in their sympoietic, messy, and leaky character: intelligence of matter in sympathetic, mutually symbiotic becomings, which can be seen as creative (Massumi 2014). I argue that tuning into situated, affective, and material settings enhances skills in knowing what other-than-humans would care about and desire. When the arts of noticing are informed about microbial agents all around us, it can fuel becomings that demonstrate the radically relational and codependent nature of all beings.
Arts of noticing in the multi-species, sympoietic-ethnography ratify that creatures want to become together, form relations, express curiosity, be exposed to each other’s microbiomes, and not be restricted in creating symbiosis. That involvement and the allowance formulated my position in the project and led to more-than-human creativity and biodiversity, where collaboration was contamination of holobiontic co-enactment. The agency of a goat is not reduced by locating the focus in the guts of goats and humans and soils, where microbes enact our relationality. What is dismantled is the individual subject position that is reserved for humans, in search of enactments that better suit collaboration-contamination and animal politics. I hope that this emphasis on radical relationality promotes an ethical stand of responsibility within more-than-human coexistence.
The plantationocene is a logic very similar to that of Western epistemologies that dictate how biological identities and lonely Western subjects should be perceived: each individually deprived of their companion species; exploitable. Messy epistemologies are challenging to assert. However, staying with the messiness is a necessity when adopting relational and processual ontologies; it proposes that symbiosis is not something rare but happens everywhere (Haraway 2016). Industrial and productionist ways of dealing with the environment do destroy biodiversity in agriculture and elsewhere. The relational and messy ontologies and epistemologies are better suited for the needs of biodiversity. The contribution of Agential Guts is to provide evidence of material and affective situations that were not based on the logic of management but on the logic of involvement.
Care often has a lot to do with disciplining the cared-for ones, but admittedly when letting the dirty and messy take its space, care becomes a matter of emergence and allowance of the symbiosis: being creative in streaming toward perhaps balanced ecosystems without humans being the central agents of solutions. In that context, I conclude that multi-species care should at times be the opposite of control itself, and attuned to the creativity and playfulness inherent in all matter. I have witnessed how the arts of noticing can generate artistic collaboration attuned to rewilding, making less effort in controlling and reserving maximum space for microbes to return, therefore rendering macrofauna and plants resilient, and allowing insects to inhabit the ecosystem in a balanced way. In this context of contamination for biodiversity, definitions of self-care become reciprocal multi-species care. On my Earthbound human behalf, gently supporting the biodiverse situation, I hope this exposition could open ways for further responsible co-enactments within multi-species care, rewilding, and assembling for biodiversity. I hope to provide speculative and art-based means to relate responsibly to the layers of Gaia suffering from our human actions.