Technologies of Fertility
Beatriz da Costa’s triptych video art installation, Dying For the Other, provides a visual representation of the artist’s own transformations; she documented her transformation from artist to subject, from patient to medical research, from living to dying. Through this documentation da Costa challenges many of the conventions of being a cancer patient, of being an artist and of dying. The video features footage of transgenic mice that are being used in cancer research. Beatriz da Costa’s art contains many truths and ways of knowing that do not fit neatly into the constructs of knowledge that academia and the dominant culture consider to be scientific disciplines. Art became science, science became art, and in that process truths were revealed that transcend classification. The parallels drawn between the lived experiences of the transgenic mice and the lived experiences of Beatriz herself transcend into commonality through their collective processes of dying. As Donna Haraway states in the FemTechNet Dialogue: Feminism, Technology, and Transformation, “Perhaps the mice feel pain. Perhaps their naked skin will burn and shed, except of course, that it is they that are dying for the other, and I am the other. I should be grateful to them and their pain, and to Beatriz who in the scheme of things was also a lab animal serving a larger agenda.”
This semester we have been inspired by da Costa’s ability to theorize about a subject that so many of us avoid thinking about at all costs. We were also intimidated by the reach of militarism, capitalism, neoliberalism, and neocolonialism in funding technological research and innovation. This system leads to what we call technologies of death. In order to bridge these sources of inspiration we decided to focus on technologies of fertility, or technologies of life.
As a technology, compost relies on biological organisms in order to produce the nutrients of fertility that life needs to grow. The flesh becomes technology, and the technology becomes flesh. When applied to garden crops as a form of agricultural technology compost produces healthier, more nutrient rich foods that in turn nourish human life. Compost is a technology that encourages health and fertility. Nature cycles and recycles elements and nutrients ceaselessly to nurture life. Large scale explosions of stars that release minerals into space allow biological organisms to incorporate these same minerals. Micro scale bacterial decomposers recycle nutrients from bodies that no longer hold life. We could neither exist without exploded stardust nor without bacteria.
To pay homage to this cycling of nutrients we decided to build a compost box that relies on worms to decompose biological waste (food waste for example). This box was painted with an image of the universe inspired by the hourglass nebula as our tribute to our oldest ancestors, the stars.
We then drilled four small holes in the bottom of the box for drainage. Once the drainage holes were in place we lined the box with burlap that was salvaged from an industrial sized coffee sack. This burlap connects our compost box to globalized labor struggles; who packed the coffee beans into the original sack? In order not to forget the labor of caring for life we decided to include dryer lint in our project. The dryer lint connects our box to the struggles of house-work laborers. We made a clay out of the dryer lint and formed a woman’s bust out of it. We placed the transformed lint into the box. In preparation for our botic agents of transformation we also shredded some of our notes from class and placed them in the box. They will become the medium that the worms consume to produce castings.
Once the construction of the compost box was finished, and the paint and lint clay were dry, we introduced our worms to their new home. We then fed the worms some food scraps and watched as they began to deconstruct this semester’s work.
The worms feed, grow, and reproduce, as their digestion transforms our waste into nutrient rich compost.
To complete our composting project, challenge ourselves to consider decomposition throughout our day to day lives, and celebrate the beauty that can exist in decomposition we dehydrated orange slices and made