Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University of Huddersfield
Imaginary Agents—Flowers and the Common: essay on BCL Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel
This book chapter explores issues of bio-hacking, the common, societal plants and politics in BCL’s (Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel) artwork Common Flowers Flower Commons. Tracing DIY flower production and distribution, ‘Imaginary Agents—Flowers and the Common’ mobilises questions and suggestions of how such emerging practices link to subtle forms of activism, the everyday and instructive codes. Investigating diverse formats of conversations the project is also a proposal for exploring new models of knowledge in art and horticulture. My methodology involved interviews with the artists and a critical analysis of the artwork, which uses strategies of bio-hacking and bio-sharing to suggest formulas for the people – the common – to appropriate techniques of genetic modification for their own purposes. The essay identifies potential concepts that locate the question of a desire for movement from aesthetics to the (bio)political in the contemporary debate of DIY practices. Linking the phenomenon of a ‘botanical diaspora’ (Lois Weinberger) to Giorgio Agamben’s ‘form-of-life’ as processes of living above all power, and artistic practice that uses biotechnology, the text exposes the contaminating and to a degree illusory nature of the biopolitical. It is assumed here that art, specifically DIY practice, plays a major, albeit discreet, role in the construction and proliferation of narratives around sovereignty and the dominance of a ‘becoming’. The significance of the research is seen in its provocative and subversive approach to (bio)science and coding, entering creative practice only by way of a silent mode of activism that necessarily includes the common – the people. The essay contributes to formulations of a political sense intrinsic to contemporary artistic practice. The text follows ideas presented earlier at the ‘Coded Cultures: Exploring Creative Emergencies’ symposium, Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna (2009).
