BIOART + DESIGN AFRICA

Bioart + Design Africa focus areas

Microbiological ecologies

Microbial ecologies are realised through the Creative Microbiology Research Colab (CMRC). Founded by VIAD Director, Prof Leora Farber and Prof Tobias Barnard, Director of the Water and Health Research Centre, in the UJ Faculty of Health Sciences, this inter-disciplinary collaboration is dedicated to producing and disseminating contemporary art and design research that interfaces with microbial science. Its focus is on use of microbes as material and content to generate art and design outputs.

Reparative/precarious ecologies

Ecological practices, or ‘eco-art’ is seen as a contemporary form of environmental art, with a clear political agenda related to local and global environmental concerns. Artists and designers use ethical practice to redress how human intervention impacts on ecospheres. The work can involve ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist and community-based interventions geared towards achieving climate justice.

Botanical ecologies

This focus area is dedicated to the development of innovative creative research directions and approaches using plant science, plant-life matter and biotechnologies that foster symbiotic relationships between humans and the botanical world. Here, artists and designers examine the relationships between plants and their biotic environments in ways that that prompt synergistic, symbiotic and entangled relationships between the human and the more-than-human.

Biomedical ecologies

This interdisciplinary focus area draws on the creative and intellectual strengths of diverse disciplines across the arts, humanities and medical science to shift westernised and patriarchal powers and politics of disease. Topics of exploration include histories and cultures of medicine; disability studies; gender and the body; communities in crisis; bioethics; and public health. Work produced under this focus area may deal with entangled relationships between the human body, bacteria and viruses; host-pathogen interactions; contagion and contamination; immunology and the body in relation to biotechnology.

Material ecologies

This focus area incorporates nature-centric and living design, in which biomatter and ecosystems are essential components in new synthesized design forms. It covers design that investigates the development of a product through the invention of new biomaterials or the repurposing of existing ones; new production processes; as well as sustainable development options for creative and functional applications. It includes work that replaces industrial or mechanical systems with a biological process, and work that goes beyond functional or speculative design into the realm of visual art.

QUEER ECOLOGIES

Queer ecologies bring bioart and design together with queer theory and ecology to shift paradigms away from binary, rigid and heteronormative ways of understanding sexuality and gender in relation to living organisms. These intersectional and interdisciplinary practices break down the assumed heterosexuality and cis-genderedness in biology that has been the baseline for scientific studies for centuries. The inherent non-heterosexual queerness of fauna and flora is drawn upon to prompt sexual and gendered interdependency and fluidity.

AFROFUTURIST ECOLOGIES

Afrofuturist ecologies linked to bioart and design, enable decolonial practice by centering ancestral knowledge, technological innovation and speculative imagination. Challenging Eurocentric scientific narratives, they embrace relationality, multi-species coexistence and ecological repair. Bioart critiques colonial legacies in biotechnology and environmental degradation, while biodesign reimagines textiles and other industrial processes and products, architecture, and food systems through African biomimetic traditions. By merging storytelling, ritual, and bio-technoscience, these fields generate new political, aesthetic, and biological possibilities for decolonial futures.

Although bio-art and design practice (as it is commonly understood) has gained traction in the international arena since the 1990s, its recognition in South Africa and the broader African context remains limited, thus presenting a unique opportunity for creative and theoretical exploration. While taking cognisance of work done in the global North, and drawing from it, BA + DA aims to generate insights and perspectives grounded in African contexts. It is founded on the conviction that work produced under our expanded definition of bio-art and -design holds enormous transformative potential to re-situate the site of knowledge generation if deployed as an agent of decolonisation.

As anti-colonial scholars from Aimé Cesaire and Frantz Fanon to Walter Mignolo and Achille Mbembe argue, the key issue underpinning what Françoise Vergès calls the ‘Racial Capitalocence’[iv] is justice for the billions of black and indigenous lives that have been commodified, quantified and extracted using a geological approach to ecosystems, knowledge and relations. Achieving climate justice as a form of social justice necessitates shifting the geos-logic of capitalist colonial science, used to justify colonial relationships with humans and more-than-humans; living and non/living matter and nature and culture relations, towards indigenous and/or post-biological ontologies. In this regard, BA + DA acts as an incubator for a form of decolonial practice which has the potential to challenge the dynamics of westernised knowledge systems linked to power and control. These include those hegemonic forces that have shaped relationships with humans and the more-than-human; living and non/living matter; nature and culture; life and death. Work produced in BA + DA advocates a decentering of the (white, male) Cartesian subject of humanist discourse. Bioart encompasses the causes and patterns of climate change and their effect on the ecosystem. It also recognises bio-art and design’s ability to be mobilised as an agent of political change and transformation in relation to issues around race, gender and class.

By fostering experiential, bodily approaches to creative practice, entangles relationships and what new feminist writer Karen Barad terms and ‘intra-actions’ [v] between the human and the more-than-human; living and non/living matter, based on empathy, respect and care, BA + DA promotes the symbiotic entanglement and “intra-dependence” [vi] of living and non/living entities, as well as the multiple forms of humanities that exist in trans-species alliances based on diversity, complexity and hybridisation.

We believe that the combination of alternative forms of collaborative praxis; experimental ways of working with biomatter and biomaterials; unconventional methodologies and Practice-Led Research with indigenous forms of knowledge which foreground ecocentrism, could generate a powerful platform to erode the violent histories of slavery, humanist thinking, imperialism, colonial oppression and racial-capitalism and expose their roles as agents of destruction in relation to the ecosphere. Through the production of insights and perspectives that arise from, and pertain to, an African context, BA + DA provides a critical Africanised footprint wherein bio-art and -design − as per our definition of it − becomes a means to prompt social, economic, environmental and political transformation though decolonial practice.