TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

Based on my work at the art academy, where I have built a biolab space and an artistic research program around it, I will map problems, intimacies, principles and failures of how to work with precariousness: with that what escapes capture. This paper will thus derive from a pedagogical practice but also disciplinary and existential struggles of experimentation that betrays masters.
Within the Art Academy I teach, there is a deep rooted ideology that art is autonomous. It derives from a cultural belief and value of an importance of art to stand alone, to not be influenced by governments, society and politics. Nevertheless, that what allows to define and to declare what art is, is a powerful act: it states and creates a reality, but it is also a boundary making event - a border line that marks the reality as separate and stable.
To start to declare art as autonomous first, can make art appear as a fixed phenomenon, giving it a sense of indifference and immutability within changing societies and cultures. When taking autonomy as a first condition and defining moment of action, regardless of living bodies and their environments, it becomes a word that shields against all, namely constrains but also accountability. In my practice as a teacher and researcher thus, I struggle to overcome the disciplinary belief in autonomy, that derives for the longing for purity and imperial imagination of control. Instead, I learn how to teach risk and uncertainty that emerges from being uncomfortable because not knowing. The shame and frustration are the elements that guides, as they crack the habits of mastery. As such, this paper will discuss the arts of attentiveness elaborated by Deborah Bird Rose, how her ethological practices of care can be part of art and ecological teaching. The notion of contamination will be discussed as an onto- epistemological tool that shapes practices of encounter and teaching, but not only.
In this way, I will elaborate on the notion of contamination as precariousness that is an already ethical event, way of attentive encounter with bodies that needs to be not only acknowledged but learned and unlearned. This paper will thus draw on ethology to discuss further possibility of contamination that resist what Isabell Lorey defined as precarization. The form of the paper will have theoretical and personal tone, woven by the mutating personas of a witch, a ghost, and a demon – they will navigate contaminating and mutating character of the problems encountered.