Interdisciplinary Conference

TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE

in Art & Science

9-13 September 2025, Kino Šiška, Ljubljana

Transgressing Death, Transgressing Grief

Event Hours: 10/09/2025 (14:00)

Location: Komuna - Kino Šiška

Marietta Radomska

Death is a node.

It is a point of implosion, where past, present, and future collapse – a presence/absence of that which dies.

And perhaps, a collapse for those who remain.

A key concern in Western philosophy and culture.

A point of reference. A term eternally re-appropriated by discourse.

Subject to both pornification and tabooisation at the same time.

Death has been at the centre of both art and philosophy since these fields’ very inception. And yet, something has changed in the 20th and 21st century. The planetary scales of Anthropocene necropolitics, interlocked with both slow and spectacular (environmental) violence, and more-than-human poli-crisis, bring ‘proximity to death’ to a whole different level. Slow death, social death, ecocide, extinction. Of species, and of hope.

This theoretical intervention – mobilised via dialogue with contemporary artworks and artists – zooms in on the ways in which select contemporary eco-, bio- and new-media artworks articulate and mould their understanding and relation to more-than-human death and extinction. Grounded in queer death studies, the paper traces how the discussed artworks – weaving the bios, the soma, the zoe, and the techne – transgress the human-exceptionalist conceptualisations, imaginaries, understandings, and approaches to death, dying, and mourning. Visual and material storytelling – fleshed out through the works of Terike Haapoja, Polina Choni, Svenja Kratz, and Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg, among others – digs deep into the questions of relating, remembrance, ethics, and peculiar forms of resistance. Ultimately, they all offer – in very different ways – an assortment of conceptual and affective strategies which simultaneously queer and expand our own relationship to death, dying, and grief.

Marietta Radomska

Marietta Radomska, PhD, Docent, is Associate Professor of Environmental Humanities at Linköping University; director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab (https://ecobioartlab.net/); co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network (https://queerdeathstudies.net/). Radomska is the author of Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart (2016); co-editor of the book series ‘Focus on More-than-human Humanities’ (Routledge); and co-editor of books State of the Art – Elements for Critical Thinking and Doing (BAS 2023) and Routledge Handbook of Queer Death Studies (forthcoming 2025). In years 2017-22 she led two research projects on ecologies of death, environmental violence and contemporary art (funded by Vetenskapsrådet, FORMAS, and MISTRA), and since 2022 has been the PI of the research project ‘Ecological Grief, Crisis Imaginaries and Resilience in Nordic Lights’ (2022-26), funded by FORMAS Research Council for Sustainable Development. She works at the intersection of environmental humanities, continental philosophy, queer death studies, visual culture, contemporary art, and artistic research; and has published in Australian Feminist Studies; Somatechnics; Environment and Planning E, and Artnodes, among others. Web: www.mariettaradomska.com.

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