Family/Market/Factory — Women in the Integrated Circuit — Feminist Corpus of Organismic Art

This entry examines feminist organismic artworks as it dismantles patriarchal obsessions with code and creation, showing the complexities of life in symbiosis (life lived with others). The artworks considered here feature cohabitation, collaboration, and contamination in a world that was never pure. The essay interprets artworks that utilize impure biotopes, enlist extremophiles as performative symbionts, and collect the piss of installation preparators to feed fungi that cohabit with ceramics in the space of art. Finnish artist Jenna Sutela is the focus, analyzing a project of Sutela’s dubbed Orgs. The art project exemplifies what the essay calls symbiontics: the ontic as that-which-is, and symbiosis as the field condition in which life is actually found.