2023 The Shelled Gastropod: Trans-Corporeality In Necro-Ecologies

This paper contributes to contemporary dialogues on the permeability of bodies, our trans-corporeality (Alaimo 2010), within the milieu of a posthumanist new materialism with a specific focus on necro-ecologies and forensic architecture (Weizman, 2012, 2021). Like Barad’s ‘agential trans*materiality’ (2015) and Bradotti’s ‘active transposition’ (2006), the trans- in Alaimo’s trans-corporeality signifies a plethora of intersectional readings offering a conduit for thought. Here, the prefix functions as a becoming and ontological folding of binary sensibilities, whether -gender, -species or interior-exterior conditional relations. In this contribution, attention is also paid to sites of trans-ition (as with hospitals and mortuaries), and the ‘transmigration of form’ (Oestigaard, 2005) (i.e., putrefaction, seepage, confluence, re-constitution) following funereal practices. This paper uses a discursive-diffractive methodology in recognising these space-time matterings (Barad, 2007).

In particular, this paper builds on the production and exhibition of Soft-Shell, 2023: a series of site-specific sculptures made using condensation cure silicone to produce skinnings or casts of architectural features (a sink and gutter-way) in a disused chapel and mortuary. This space is now used by GUT Level, a not-for-profit queer arts collective in Sheffield. The works function as permanent embalmings and positive-negative imprints of the space that was used for the temporary storage of human bodies before their disposal. In reference to quantum field theory’s understanding that matter is ‘a condensation of other beings, places, and times’ (Barad, 2015, p. 416), condensation cure silicone acts as a material prompt. The use of rubber is purposeful in Soft-Shell: a material used for medical implants, procedures, and preservation practices, to slow the process of putrefaction. A tiled structure on which the silicone pieces sit (inferring both autopsy and tomb) also offer an interface with cooling temperatures, as analogous with the trans-ience of algor mortis. The tiles provide a seemingly impermeable barrier, one that is water-tight as to contain seepage. Here, parallels are made between the infrastructure and plumbing of the church and mortuary (the basins, drains and pipes), and bodies which, after death, becomes liquescent, as ‘slippage’ begins and tissues percolate from orifices.

Following ‘our’ passing, inter-, extra-, and trans-cellular fluids permeate beyond the body into ‘symbiotic condensations’ (Neimanis, 2007, p. 29). We collectively drain and pool, participating in a hermaphroditic condition that sees no separation of matter: no partition of the human and non-human, along with other reductive binaries (i.e., passive–active, female–male, human–animal). This inseparable condition also argues against the premise of a hermetically-sealed selfhood, as explicated by Haraway’s principle of ‘humus’ and ‘sympoiesis’ (2016). In recognition of this, Soft-Shell also co-operated with a walk of snails, hermaphroditic animals, in support of this shared trans-formation. In nod to the scalloped shell used in Christian baptisms, this work and paper offers another emblem of the shelled gastropod as to signify our transfused constitution.

This paper was presented as part of the Trans Ecologies Symposium, Department of Geography at Durham University.

PANEL: Practices: Ecologies of Creativity and Play

Prompt:
How might creative and playful practices help compose with/in trans ecologies, and to decompose the taxonomic regimes through which sex, gender, and species are demarcated and policed?

This panel explores what is made possible through creative and playful practices at the interconnected levels of the body and of structures and systems of knowledge making. New forms of embodiment and relationality may issue forth from playful disruptions of dominant taxonomies, while artistic engagement with biological processes of decomposition might orient us towards modes of ambiguous slippage that signal possibilities for other ways of knowing. In exploring creativity and playfulness, this panel encourages collective reflection on ways of thinking that enable exploration of sex and gender as multiplicitous and non-linear, and modes of embodiment that exceed or confound systems of oppression and exploitation.