Dear Creatives,
In Mutante, we are happy to share with you that the project Bi0film.net: Resist like bacteria! received the Golden Nica award, in the Interactive Art + category, by the Ars Electronica Festival. The open project, created by Jung Hsu and Natalia Rivera, is co-created with Mutante and the Medienhaus/ platform. The development is based on co-creation workshops with communities interested in exploring, prototyping, and implementing this kind of communication media, sharing ideas about the importance of creating other ways to organize that could be, as this project proposes, inspired by other living organisms.
The creation began in the encounter of Natalia and Jung Hsu, at the New Media Class at the Berlin University of the Arts. In that space Jung, with whom we celebrate sharing these ideas in such geographically distant contexts, shared her experience in the political contexts of Taiwan and Hong Kong, and her research on microorganisms and politics, derived from her most recent project "Microbiopolitics". These were some of the convergence points between the two, which allowed them to think about the possibilities for that near future in which the continuation of the social outbreaks, abruptly interrupted in 2020 by the confinement measures, would take place.
The ideas and thoughts that from Natalia and our side go through the project, related to the emergence of multiple other ways of comprehension about the living, about nature and us as part of it, the in-disciplinarity of the project regarding the forms of knowledges that shape it, and the open methodologies and ways of organization that it proposes are strongly connected to the knowledge creation and collaboration processes that have been explored and developed in the context of the Suratómica Network. More recently in the “At the edge of chaos” cycle and the “Aesthetics and complexity” creation group proposed by Carlos Maldonado, in the “Other politics of the living” context proposed with Juan Diego Rivera and co-organized by Enjambre, and the creation groups “Queer forms of life” by Natalia Rivera, "Microcosmos" with the CorpoGen laboratory and the BioCrea network, “Non-existent frontiers” with Daniela Brill, and “Self-organization and other possible worlds” by Carlos Acosta, among many many other spaces that the network has created during these more than three years.
From all these encounters, contexts and spaces, Natalia writes about the project:
“ In human societies around the globe, there is fear of life. Of the mere phenomenon of the living. Fear of the living that can not be controlled, that doesn’t obey any government, that diversifies, and that creates new forms of life. Therefore, institutions and States murder.
Living beings, those eager to live, those opposing to normalization and the anesthesia of our times, have been silenced in numerous ways. They have been hit to death, they have been floating bodies in the rivers and seas, imprisoned, or in a bigger scale, lead to depression, this last one not being less dangerous.
In turn, during the last decades we have been discovering that the real nature of the living gives always some space for the unexpected, the unpredictable, the indeterminate, and that it is at this delicate border, “at the edge of chaos”, as proposed by Carlos Maldonado, in which the most wonderful possibilities can emerge. We are turning back, after a long time of artificious separation, to take a look at nature, and to ourselves as part of it, in a kinder way. Not to control it, not to exploit it, not to dominate, but to find other ways of coexistence.
The pandemic brought new understandings of the living beings, specially microorganisms, and important, as well, the urge to rethink our relations with them, treated up to now as not so relevant for our politics, or if relevant, as enemies. Today it is claimed that one of the biggest challenges for humanity is the bacterial resistance. Without leaving aside how relevant this is for human societies' health, it is in those terms a challenge, because once again and with more strength, bacteria are showing to rigid sciences and politics that humans can not control the Living.
Our project is an homage to human and bacteria resistance, in contrast to the reductionist discourse of war. To all those communities of living organisms showing over and over again that life can not be controlled. Those communities that through collaboration, a wonderful technology of the living, overcome oppression. Those showing how in the most unexpected places we are always growing inside biofilms and ready to act together when needed.
We had this chance to encounter with Jung Hsu and, with that, the chance for the encounter of the growing ideas of our contexts that go through us to take place. The more we learn about the technologies of bacteria, the more we realize how we humans resist also in those ways, in Hong Kong and in Colombia. The more we learn in Mutante and Enjambre about the ways bacteria organize, the more we connect it to anarchist ideas, those from diverse cultures and times embracing the growing degrees of freedom of life itself.
Now, when we as humanity are facing that there won't be a way to resist/survive without re inventing our relations with other living organisms and entities, with Bi0film.net we just want to share that among infinite expressions of the Living, those of bacteria can also encourage us, and that our cultures, our sciences, our technologies or biotechnologies could embrace the freedom they have and the ways they collaborate. We could resist like bacteria.”
We are happy to share our ideas and processes in the festival spaces and other platforms. We want, of course, to continue creating and collaborating around the arts and emergent media in Bogotá, while opening encounter and dialogue spaces, for other in-disciplinary ways to create to continue emerging.
¡Thanks to everyone that has been part of this project!
Jung Hsu, Natalia Rivera, Juan Diego Rivera, Manuel Orellana, Carlos Acosta, Margarita González, Daniel Osorio, Ana Isabel Castrillón, Robert Schnüll, Medienhaus/ project, Juan Manuel Anzola, Lulu Hsieh, Carlos Maldonado, ZKL, I Lun Shih, Shung Fuwei, Leslie Chi, Chunli Wang, Vais Yakarivuwan, Brian Chang, Sandra Ramos, New Media Class - UDK Berlin, Prof. Jussi Ängeslevä, Luiz Zanotello, Suratómica Network.
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Originally published the 30.06.2022 in Spanish for the Suratómica Network Newsletter
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