Written by Laura Glitsos Thursday, 10 December 2009 13:59
PIG burials, growing jackets from tissue culture and books made of human skin are just a few of the projects coming out of SymbioticA, the Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts.
SymbioticA was launched in 2000 with Director Oron Catts and Academic Co-ordinator Ionat Zurr from the Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A) working as artists/researchers in residence in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology and the Lions Eye Institute since 1996.
Nine years later, the TC&A project, now with many other multi-disciplinary investigations, continues to engage scientists, artists, academics and the public with socio-cultural implications of life science.
Ms Zurr says the TC&A project uses tissue technology as a medium for artistic expression.
“By growing tissue we creating sculptures or objects. Each has its own discourse, depending on the object,” she says.
“One of the more known (objects) is Victimless Leather, where we grow tissue in a small jacket- like shape.”
Ms Zurr says the project critiques techno-fetishism and more specifically the “victimless utopia theory”.
“This idea is a fallacy – that through technology we can create a victimless utopia,” she says.
Recently, artist in residence Pia Interlandi buried 21 specially-clothed pigs, in a bold investigation into death, decomposition and environmentally-friendly internment.
Ms Interlandi says the project is based around the natural earth burial movement, where people are now choosing to be buried without coffins, embalming or headstones.
“It’s about getting the nutrients back into the soil as soon as possible, so the bodies and garments can provide nutrients for other life forms,” she says.
It also reduces the carbon footprint of traditional burial, according to supporters.
“There’s no point being buried in something synthetic that wont go back into the earth so I’m researching garments that dissolve, like hemp fibres,” she says.
“Even some of the buttons (donated by Button Mania) are made from a milk protein and others are from nutshells.”
Theoretically, she says there is a “…huge denial of death in our culture, we embalm the body to preserve it and deny the natural processes associated with death”.
Ms Interlandi will exhume three pigs every 50 days over a year, tracking morphological changes and analysing molecular breakdown structures.
The pigs, however, were buried in style.
“The garments were designed to be aesthetic,” she says.
The clothing was printed with photographs from earlier work, where Ms Interlandi filled up mannequins with grass seeds, letting the root structure follow the contours of the body.
“Then when you flip the mannequin over you get a beautiful root structure that has taken on the shape of the body. So it’s about recreating the body,” she says.
“I photographed them extensively, also tracing over the root structure to use as an embroidery pattern.”
Visit SymbioticA online to view more projects and seminars open to the public.
