TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

This panel explores generative relationships between Science Fiction, BioArt, and Disability. Each speaker will critically and creatively share how their unique professional backgrounds both inform and confound conventional disciplinary parameters. We explore ‘difference’ not as a problem to be overcome but as a raw material from which to build new approaches towards knowledge creation and novel aesthetic practices.

Reviewing outcomes and examples from a Science Fiction, BioArt, and Disability workshop taught at Cultivamos Cultura, Portugal, in May 2025, panelists put these different disciplinary approaches in dialogue with each other, not attempting to collapse them into an imagined necessary common ground. Instead, we seek to provoke new conversations around disability and madness, biology, art and science. Thinking with Donna Haraway’s concept of “odd kin,” we consider ways to conceive futures that work in resistance to rigid definitions and standards, working towards scenarios and possible stories of open-ended alternatives. This panel considers queer methods to shape the conversation and encourages wild wonderings to begin to move beyond our known lives to alternative ones.