Cynthia Blanchette

Gifts/Presents/Presence –Meanings and Materialities Conference and Exhibition

2024

The artistic research explores microbes as both souvenirs received and gifted, in exchanges of experience imbued with meaning and consequence. In past, those who took pilgrimages collected souvenirs of different precious metals which were said to have curative properties. Now, the term ‘parasitic souvenir’ is used in biology to describe microbes that humans collect from the external environment during travel, whereas the gift-souvenir has been a token of appreciation given to friends and family upon returning from travels. In this respect, parasites as both a souvenir taken and gifted through contact produce many types of exchanges, such as horizontal gene transfer, co-evolution, immune protection, gut-brain access, illness, and death, to name a few.

My artistic work entitled ’Shit Load’ propositions the human individual to invite unknown parasites into their own body through faecal microbial transplantation (FMT’s), in the form of faecal suppositories, pessaries, bougies, eye washes, and ointments, a mobile delivery system for Parasitic Souvenirs. I am suggesting that the ‘parasite’ criticizes and disrupts the standardized body (single body with a single origin; a single genome), and its domination over the sense of self. Hypothesising that the evolutionary emotion ‘disgust’ promotes an idealistic notion of the human individual (one body from one origin) rather than continuity with other living microbial organisms. Giving birth to the gift of the ‘individual self’. Yet, when considering the gut-brain axis, the concept of the individual is shaken, bringing into question individual agency and human exceptionalism.

Porous boundary making through the eye of the bog

2021

The bog, a space that creeps our subconscious and terrorizes our bodies. The fear of bogs is interwoven into culture, transmitted through intergenerational memory and folklore to build communal anxiety and disdain for the bog and swamp. This is a journey to the dark side of the bog, grounded in the western world’s theoretical and cultural history. The bog represents a concrete metaphor for the darker aspects of contemporary life and fears.

The bogland is a reminder of the uncivilized, undomesticated, untamed, and unruly human potential; a somatophobia inducing reminder that we come from bodies, we make coitus with bodies, and that we ourselves have bodies and as such will die in our bodies. The bog disrupts humankind’s confabulations of being civilized, above nature and above all ‘death’. Even in death humans attempt to put boundaries between themselves and natural life cycles through embalming and airtight coffins or cremation, giving no nutrients back to the soils that fed and nurtured them. Of the animal kingdom, the human is the most selfish consumer of the earth’s resources, refusing even in death to give the nutrients they took from the soil back to the earth in the form of decaying matter; a body-gift.

Our skin does not give us full protection from animal bites, physical attacks or weather conditions. The acidity and humidity of wetlands further plump the skin with water increasing its porous nature, aiding the work of insects and parasites and other contagions. In response we barricade our bodies in latex and nitrile rubbers, silicone, and creams to re-enforce our boundaries from bugs and rain; all with detrimental effects to the environment through production, and our bodies through non-breathable textiles and carcinogenic chemicals. Even underwear has gone from primarily being made of natural breathable materials to synthetic non-breathable materials, might the reason be a fear of invasion or bad smells?

The peatlands of the bog make up only three percent of the world’s land surface, yet store double the carbon of all the world’s forests (Ramsar, 2018) which make up thirty-one percent of the world’s land surface (FAO and UNEP, 2020). As if that were not enough, they in fact store more carbon than all the world’s vegetation put together (Ramsar, 2018). Drained and burned peatlands lose their carbon sink and capture potential, giving rise to centuries of stored carbon (UNEP, 2019; Ramsar, 2018). A study in Finland where over fifty percent of peatland has been drained (primarily for timber/forestry projects (53%) and agriculture) has found that the remaining undrained peatland hydrology is disrupted by adjacent drainage areas (Sallinen et al., 2019, p.1). Even so, wetlands remain an inexplicable omission from global climate change actions, regardless of their pivotal role in providing almost all clean freshwater, and flood disaster protection (Ramsar, 2018). Research has shown that inland wetlands have an “…economic value five times higher than tropical forests…” (Ramsar, 2018) and are the most priceless terrestrial habitat to human survival on earth. This research highlights the urgency to change our prejudices towards bogs and swamps.

This project culminated in a wearable system designed to protect both the boundaries and porosity of the bog and the human body during bog encounters in an attempt to build new just and respectful relationships with swamps and bogs. Addressing concepts of domestication, wild and nature; what it means to be scenic beauty within euro-western perspectives of “wild”. In addition to, the colonizers need to control nature, due to the fear and panic of invasion into the domestic/urban space led by hygiene and sanitation which produced the need for further distancing boundaries from natural porous natures.

Martin Dahlström-Heuser (Photographer). Tapiola, Finland. Photo credit for all documentation in Tapiola and Helsinki Metro Station.

Jouni Toivanen (Photographer). Järvenpää, Finland. Photo credit for uniform images in the forest and studio documentation.

Full Thesis: https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-202111019949