AKI BIO MATTERs is an artistic research program that focuses on working with new biomaterials where art and design meet life science, philosophy, politics, ecology, bioethics, and DIY biology.
Can we imagine and pursue other forms of living, different practices, habits, and desires that will change us rather than allow us to live as we do?
This artistic research programme focuses on finding new biomaterials and developing new theoretical and practical understandings of how to live in the precarity of the future that has always been. The programme focuses on developing ecologically and critically engaged art and design practice by engaging artists and designers with DIY biology, biohacking, life science, and speculative ways and methods of working with living bodies.
Inventing differences carefully. Within BIO MATTERs, what matters are difficult questions and experimentations not to achieve more control but rather to allow speculation and attentiveness to bodies’ variety, change and mutations to be present in creative practice. With a philosophically engaged hands-on approach, questions such as whether we can imagine and pursue life forms, practices, habits and desires that will change – rather than facilitate – our lives are raised. How can we change the anthropocentric gaze? How to think about what is defined as living and natural? What margins can we carefully create with life, and what are the implications of life manipulations? How to practise living and dying bodies in art and design? How to live with contamination and its risks?
Symbiosis of theory and practice. During lecture discussions, readings, and workshops, the programme explores problems, methods, and ideas as they arise within the life sciences, philosophy, ethics, and ecology. The goal of BIO MATTERs is to bring new methodologies and ways of thinking into the artistic and design realm, where difficult yet urgent ecological and aesthetic questions are critically researched through material practice. This allows urgent questions to be raised hands-on when we immediately experience our role and responsibility before the living bodies we create with.
For whom
The AKI BIO MATTERs programme is open to all students from their 2nd year BA onwards from all departments at ArtEZ. It is an artistic research programme that runs for 2 semesters, with the possibility of attending one semester (8 EC).
When and where
Every Thursday from 10.00h-16.00 CEST (12 meetings, Spring semester ends with an exhibition ).
Topics of focus (selection)
- Art and Design in Anthropocene – rethinking the anthropocentrism;
- Biohacking Human – on genetic essentialism;
- Growing your Art – working with bacteria, mushrooms, and plants;
- Biodesign for Plastocene – making your bioplastic;
- Living images – on the alchemy of vision and nonhuman gaze.
Lecturers
The programme is led by Dr. Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, who has a background in philosophy of art, art and science relations, posthumanism and new materialism. During the programme, she gives lectures and practical workshops that complement each other and guide students’ research.
Collaborating tutors: Patrick Mangnus, who teaches about biomaterial methods in graphic arts; Aalt van de Glind who teaches about non-human and non-lens photography.
The programme invites various artists and designers as guest teachers. Previous guest artists and designers were Raphael Kim, Aniela Hoitink, Sonja Bäumel, Zeger Reyers, Špela Petrič, Adam Zaretsky, Pei-Ying Lin, Christine van der Heide, Adriana Knouf, Roland van Dierendonck, Maro Pebo, Merle Bergers, Helena Sanders
Contact and registration
Dr. Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko, email a.wolodzko@artez.nl
See relevant publications:
Biolab: where art and science converge: link
A.A. Wołodźko, Affect as Contamination. Embodiment in Bioart and Biotechnology, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
A.A. Wołodźko, “Agropleasure in Demonic Grounds: On Resistance Across Gardens” in: The Space of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, eds. R. Gorny, S. Kousoulas, D. Perera, A. Radman, TU Delft & Jap Sam Books, pp. 193-211, link
A.A. Wołodźko, “Tiny Mining: Theory of the earth from a sweatshop – on practising becoming cosmic” in Becoming Geological, ed. by Martin Howse, Rotterdam: V2 Publishing, 2022, 15-27.
A.A. Wołodźko, “Demonological re-enchantments – or how to contaminate through intimate stories of commons without consensus,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research, 18:2&3, 2022, 97–104, link
A.A. Wołodźko, “Living Within Affect as Contamination: Breathing in Between Numbers,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Vol. 2 No. 1-2, 2020, 211-224, link
Past (public) events/workshops:
A conversation with Mijke van der Drift and Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko about Affect as Contamination, podcast radio ArtEZ, November 13, 2023: link
Posthuman Pedagogies in Practice,
Workshop by Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko during the conference Future Art School; (Un)learning Practices, 30 November 2023, link
Matters of Witches, Plants and Potions, program on decolonial and material feminist take on how we gather knowledge led by A.A.Wołodźko within Artez Honours Lab and AKI Biomatters collaboration, 2022-2023.
Matters of Demons, Ghost and Aliens, program on relational and more than human ways of knowing and sensing led by A.A.Wołodźko within Artez Honours Lab and AKI Biomatters collaboration, 2022-2023.
Sentient Encounters: series of film screenings and discussions on reimagining and reclaiming sentience to describe relations with bodies still excluded from meaning-making practices. Collaboration between Sjoerd van Oevelen (Department head of Moving Image, AKI Enschede), Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko (initiator and lecturer AKI BIO MATTTERs), and supported by ArtEZ studium generale, 2022, link
Living Matters online exhibition – storytelling by AKI Bio Matters research on the precarity that has always been now, June 2020: link
How on Earth presents Living Images – movie screening series on ecologies of vision in collaboration with Artez Studium Generale 2019: link
Biodesign of Plastocene exhibition and symposium at Tetem 27 March – 7 April 2019
The present exhibition was a result of the artistic research programme at AKI BIO MATTERs in 2018/2019 that addresses the problems of anthropocene and materially speculates on possible scenarios of change through biodesign practice: link
Science-Friction workshop and symposium at the Design Lab UT Twente 22 November 2017
– symposium on the contemporary discussions around the practices of biotechnologies that asked how new biotech bodies create disruptions that change our way of living. It was the joint production by AKI and DesignLab University of Twente curated by Agnieszka Anna Wołodźko and Frank Kresin: link
