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Short Papers

Transcendence and Microbiopolitics: Art and biology as material

speculation

Pérez-Bobadilla, Mariana
City University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong
maro.pebo@cityu.edu.hk

Abstract Decay is brought forth in the work of Ana Laura Cantera,

Death, decay, and transcendence are transformed if
interpreted from a microbial perspective. This paper
constructs a non-anthropocentric approach on a microbial
scale through the concept of microbiopolitics, an expanded
notion of biopolitics with the inclusion of ​zoe​, a
postanthropocentric interpretation of ecological relations,
focused on the life of microorganisms and introducing an
ecological thought for the microbial planet. This research
explores, in particular, the work of Latin American artists
Ana Laura Cantera and Gilberto Esparza as a form of
material speculation that opens up alternatives of thought
grounded on the accountability of biological and
technological matter, its limits and possibilities.
Keywords
Microbiopolitics, Art and biology, Posthuman, Bioart,
Bacteria, New materialism.
Introduction
When microbial fuel cells light up, the continuity of energy
-chemical and electrical- in a system becomes visible and
the continuity of machine organization and biological
metabolism is enacted. Through case studies from art and
biology, this paper deals with works where a speculative
​
imagination of life as zoe ​
instead of bios is made present.
Attention is displaced from the angst or desire around
eternal human life from our finitude, displacing the ​bios
from the human.
As a theoretical framework, this paper follows Rosi
Braidotti in imagining life in a wider inclusive way as
zoe​.[1] Materially, it presents transdisciplinary art research
as an exploration of life in a wider sense allowing for the
speculative imagination of a microbial world,
microbiopolitics grounded in the materiality of the
artworks.
who integrates the microbial fuel cells to an ephemeral
process, researching ecological possibilities with a
microbial perspective.
Ninhos de Equilíbrio​ by Ana Laura Cantera as
decay and transformation.
Ninhos de Equilíbrio is an installation of mud sculptures as
an intervention on the landscape. The small structures are
built with biodegrading materials found in the place of the
installation and look similar to the termite mounds in the
landscape, among which they camouflage almost perfectly.
Termite mounds are abundant in the hills of the Paraiba
Valley in Brazil where the work was installed. Called
“nests” because of the word for termite mound in
Portuguese and Spanish, the small domes are meant as a
dwelling space. These sculptures or “nests” are also
biodegradable mud bacterial fuel cells, their structure is
built with clay mud, cane leaves, and water from the river.
Inside they house bioplastic capsules containing local mud
with organic waste in decomposition which allows the flow
of energy from bacterial metabolism. This process
channels the energy that illuminates the interior with an
LED—a tiny luminous sign of the life within the
structure—which shines during a short lifespan before the
nest disintegrates.
Ana Laura Cantera, an Argentine artist developed this
project in 2014 as part of an artistic residence in the rural
area of the Paraiba Valley, a region in the eastern part of
the state of São Paulo, Brazil.

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Figure 1. Ana Laura Cantera, ​Ninho de Equil​í​brio [​Balance
Nests​], 2015. Courtesy of the Artist.
In ​Ninhos de Equilíbrio,​ decay occurs in two levels. The
first is the transformation of chemical energy within
organic matter into electric energy made visible through
the light. The second is the biodegradable structure, meant
to be ephemeral and dissolve into the landscape.
Cantera’s work frames microorganisms as agents for the
transformation of energy in microbial fuel cells and in the
process of degradation, and it renders the reactions in the
ecosystem visible. Microorganisms are present as a tool
that releases and conducts electrons to turn on a light; but
bacteria are also represented at the base of the ecosystem,
in the degradation of organic matter. The processes that
take place in this work lie in the continuum nature-culture.
The human-made mounds display the energy of the matter
and the presence of microbial life, which disintegrate into
the landscape again as part of a greater transformation.
A previous project, which informed Ninhos de Equilíbrio,
is Gilberto Esparza’s ​Nomadic Plants​. This five-year long
project was developed between 2008 and 2013 and
explores the ecosystemic relations within
machine-microbial entanglement.
Gilberto Esparza’s ​Nomadic Plants​ as figurations
of the microbial posthuman
Nomadic Plants is a hybrid creature intended to relate to
the polluted water of a river by “feeding” itself with its
water high in organic waste. Through the work of bacteria
within the microbial fuel cells (also known as MFCs) that
make up the body of ​Nomadic Plants​, electrons can be
harvested as a by-product to be used as the energy source
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for the creature. This process also purifies the water
collected, which is then repurposed for the plants that
inhabit the hybrid organism and make it a habitat for other
species like ants.
Figure 2. Gilberto Esparza, ​Nomadic Plants​, 2008-2013.
Displayed at Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City. Courtesy
of the artist.
In this work by Gilberto Esparza, notions of decay, death,
and transcendence are present in the graphic narrative that
supplements the installation (Figure 3). In the border of
fiction and actuality, the story was designed as a comic for
the book ​Cultivos [13]. The narration begins when in 1945
the Lerma River—which is a major supplier of water to
Mexico City and the Valley of Mexico—becomes a
dumping site for private and industrial waste, as well as
drainage from Mexico City. As industries keep growing
and developing, the river’s fauna starts to die en masse.
The heavily polluted water also causes the river to catch on
fire. As a result, new species of artificial and biological life
appear.
Nomadic Plants​, the artwork and main character of this
story, is a symbiont of local plants, bacteria, and a
machine. The creature lives from the polluted water thanks
to its symbiosis with bacteria within its microbial fuel
cells. At night, the organism utilizes the surplus of energy
generated throughout the day to produce sound. The clean
water welcomes other species to cohabitate on the its
structure. When the environment finally changes and the
river is restored, the creature can no longer feed on
wastewater and dies. In this narrative, a Mexican cypress
grows on the robot’s corpse. Decay and death in ​Nomadic
Plants​ is the sign of life for the river and other plants.
A common misinterpretation of Esparza’s work [14] is
the idea that microbial fuel cells could solve the water
pollution problem of Mexican rivers and that, therefore, no

difference in the current ecological relations would be
necessary. However, what Esparza’s collection of
microbial and organic matter within MFCs points to is
actually a postanthropocentric view on our relationship to
water. The project also makes visible a specific ecological
condition: it imagines the life of machines and presents
death in a diversity of perspectives— the death of rivers,
the symbiosis of microorganisms, machines, and plants
without the presence of humans, and the death of ​Nomadic
Plants ​itself.
D
Figure 3. “In its long and slow journey, it exhausts its reserves of
energy. Meanwhile, a seed of ​Ahuhuete ​[Mexican cypress]
germinates inside it to live for a thousand years.” Gilberto
Esparza, Illustration from ​Nomadic Plants​’ Story, ​Cultivos​, 2014.
Courtesy of the artist​.
Nomadic Plants has been interpreted in their environmental
and political stand within the Latin American context
[16][17]. In this article, however, I would like to focus
instead on how microbiopolitics is also related to an
alternative view of life. ​Nomadic Plants,​ in a condition
where rivers are no longer polluted, dies and allows its
plants to take over. Again, in this fictional narrative about
the work, death and decay are the possibility for other life
forms to take over.
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Short Papers
These two artworks, ​Ninhos de Equilíbrio ​and ​Nomadic
Plants​, allow us to re-think ​bios understood in a wider way
beyond human life, and, particularly, in the
postanthropocentric turn it can bring in what I call the
microbial posthuman.
Microbial Posthuman
The core proposal to begin thinking
postantrhopocentrically through microorganisms, in this
case about decay and transcendence, has to be
contextualized in the convergence of posthuman and
postanthropocentric thought and, specifically, within
feminist research.
Among the many possible ways the posthuman has been
defined, I subscribe to a tradition of feminist posthuman
thought, specifically in the non-essentialist cyborg
N
described by Donna Haraway [4], in Rosi Braidotti’s
O
notion of the condition of humanʼ or manʼ as a
TI
prerogative of privileged, white males that needs to be
questioned [5], and in Karen Barad’s Agential Realism [6],
U
which interprets the relation of matter and meaning beyond
IB
anthropocentric limitations, establishing non-hierarchical
TR
relations among species and understanding humans among
other physical systems as part of “natural” processes. A
IS
more recent approach to the posthuman is also found in the
fungal critiques to capitalism by Anna Tsing [7]. Among
all these feminist posthuman positions, my microbial
posthuman builds on the biological materiality of
microorganisms as the minimal form of life to challenge
human exceptionalism.
Within this cartography, the microbial perspective adds a
layer to the posthuman. In several levels, microorganisms
challenge anthropocentric epistemologies and our
understanding of what life is. Starting from the familiar
ground of the human body, the microbiome is a first step in
acknowledging the fundamental need of bacteria and other
microorganisms for the possibility of any form of
macroscopic life, including, of course, animal and human
life.
Second, instead of understanding individual humans as
unitary discrete entities, the microbiome challenges our
concept of self [8]. Tobias Rees portrays humans as a
dynamic, constantly transforming interacting community
of animal and microbial cells. Rees deals with the three
main elements that are thought to constitute the basis of an
individual human self—the immune systems, the brain, and
the genome system—to describe how they are deeply
affected by and entangled with microorganisms. The self
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and individuality of humans, therefore, is set in question by
microorganisms.
Third, the predecessors of all forms of life are microbial.
Human identity, besides its necessary relation to
microorganisms and its bacterial origin, is also entangled
deeper by the endosymbiotic origin of plant and animal
cells. The fourth element of the microbial posthuman stems
from what Lynn Margulis described in 1967 [9]: the
bacterial origin of the mitochondrion, the organelle in
charge of energy metabolism in the cell, which was
originally a bacteria engulfed by a bigger microbial cell.
Mitochondria keep their own genome independent from the
nucleus. An equivalent case is that of cyanobacteria
engulfed by chloroplasts in plant cells, pointing at a deep
entanglement into what we now often understand as
independent species.
Fifth, microorganisms also question notions of
individuality by performing multicellular behavior such as
cell differentiation, communication, and apoptosis [10].
These are also signs of organization and cognition in
microbial forms of life.
The interest in observing microbial organization and
​
microorganisms as life, as the expanded bios ​
or zoe is also
present in the emphasis on a microbial planet,[11] a view
from microbiology inviting to consider microorganisms not
anthropocentrically—that is as pathogens or those directly
involved in food production—but in its wide diversity and
omnipresence.
The microbial posthuman is a perspective underlying the
work of Ana Laura Cantera and Gilberto Esparza as a
postanthropocentric approach to ecosystems, particularly,
as a machine, plant, and bacterial intra-action. Sustained on
microbiome research, the microbial origin of life, and in
endosymbiosis as part of a project to reimagine
microbiopolitics, ecology beyond speciesism and beyond a
capitalist distribution of pain, death, and life.
Microbiopolitics
The interpretative notion I want to introduce in this paper
departs from Heather Paxon’s “Microbioplitics” [12] as the
anthropocentric measures, politics, and policies in relation
to microorganisms. Paxon’s concept is already a crucial
step in acknowledging the fundamental role of
microorganisms in human lives. It is centered in food and
also highly focused on the human experience of
microorganisms in disease and nourishment. Beyond
acknowledging an entanglement with microorganisms or
their relevance for human life, microbiopolitics can give a
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postanthropocentic perspective in the categorization and
management of life. This transformation in relations and
structures of subjectivity stems from the concept of ​zoe​.
Zoe​, is a wider notion of life [5] that includes all forms of
life–starting with microorganisms–not centering the debate
around human life only.
Microbiopolitics, therefore, is the concept I am reworking
to underscore the transformation in relations and structures
of subjectivity when a broader, microbial notion of life or
zoe is the framework to map the distribution of pain, life,
and death. What these artworks research and the way
microbiopolitics, therefore, has an important posthuman
turn inspired by Rosi Braidotti [5] expanding the notion of
life with the inclusion of ​zoe​, a non-anthropocentric
interpretation of ecological relations when life is
understood as its minimum condition in microorganisms.
The microbial fuel cells in the work of Ana Laura Cantera
and Gilberto Esparza, are the material imagination and case
studies for this expanded notion of life, the place for
research on the possibility of microbiopolitics and its
ecosystemic implications.
The use of MFCs as an artistic medium offers the
possibility of thinking of life as a network of chemical
reactions, a nanoscale organization in continuity with other
larger scale mechanisms. Many artists including Mick
Lorusso, Laura Beloff, Carlos Castellanos, and
Insterspecifcs have explored MFCs as an artistic medium,
using living microorganisms not only as the physical
medium of the artwork but also as the source of power,
data, and discursive focus. MFCs transform chemical
energy from organic compounds into electric energy by
completing a metabolic process of oxidizing organic matter
[2]. Endosymbiosis, as theorized by Margulis [3] describes
the physiology of animal cells only possible after the
engulfment of a bacteria, in an a bigger cell. The
mitochondrion, a previously independent bacterium,
functions as a power plant’. Similarly, bacteria of the
genus ​Geobacter perform as the cyborg symbiont of the
microbial fuel cells, as they release electrons then collected
and expressed as light or as data. In this way, microbial
fuel cells as an artistic medium allow for the speculation
and material presence of posthuman symbiosis. Moreover,
by metabolizing organic waste microbial fuel cells relate to
decay more specifically; it is in the degradation of organic
matter that electrons are released and it is from muds and
“dirty” waters that the new light in these artworks emerges
from.

Art as Material Speculation
I build upon Alfred North Whitehead’s concept of
“imaginative generalization as ‘the play of a free
imagination controlled by the requirements of coherence
and logic’”[15]. As the opening up of possibilities of
thought, without losing the capacity to act in the present, I
am interested, firstly, in the power of imagination to
propose and transform the present, particularly in the form
of propositions of post-anthropocentric approaches about
decay and death. I am thinking of art as speculation, but
not speculation as a groundless or uninformed conclusion,
but as an acknowledgment of the impossibility of complete
information. Speculation and imaginative generation in
Whitehead’s thought are, therefore, useful concepts to
understand the double operation of opening up of
possibilities in fictions and in setting up limits in the
operation of thought, as I argue, material and situated. The
speculation in the works I present here is about the
distribution of life and death. Perhaps, more relevant
themes where bacteria challenge our notions of death are
the altruist apoptosis or the spore stages that I will not
develop in this paper.
Closing remarks
From a microbiopolitical perspective, life, death, decay are
​
displaced. In the death process of the Ninhos de Equilíbrio​,
as in the decay process of other bodies, microorganisms
thrive. Ana Laura Cantera’s installation lights up with the
electrons released by the decomposition of the organic
References
[1] Rosi Braidotti, ‘Biomacht und nekro–Politik. Uberlegungen
zu einer Ethik der Nachhaltigkeit’ (Bio–Power and
Necro–Politics), ​Springerin, Hefte fur Gegenwartskunst​, (2007),
2, pp 18–23.
[2] Bruce E. Logan, Exoelectrogenic bacteria that power
microbial fuel cells’, ​Nature Reviews Microbiology​, (2009) 7, pp.
375-381.
[3] Lynn Sagan/Margulis On the origin of mitosing cellsʼ,
Journal of Theoretical Biology,​ (1967), 14:3, pp.225-274.
[4] Donna Haraway, “A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology,
and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century”, in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, (New York:
Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–81.
[5] Braidotti, ​The posthuman​. (Oxford: Polity Press, 2013) p.65.
[6] Karen Michelle (Barad 2007), 2007).
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Short Papers
elements that constitute the nests, framing microorganisms
and making them visible to humans as light. As they
dissolve, ​Ninhos de Equilíbrio ​portray decay as
transcendence of life beyond the human-centred ​bios​.
In Gilberto Esparza’s ​Nomadic Plants​, the speculative
imagination is that of death as a possibility of a new start
for water and for other species, granting protagonism to
water and non-human forms of life. These cases deal with
how reestablishing our cartographies of power
relationships into the wider notions that open up in
microbiopolitcs, the concepts of the self or of individuality
are modified, as well as that of decay and death. The use of
microbial fuel cells as an artistic medium, besides its
implications of collaboration, and grant visibility to
microorganisms, is also a form of portraying decay as
transformation, as life in continuity, as energy
transforming, and therefore as transcendence.
The material grounding is artworks of art and biology from
Latin America giving a non-anthropocentric reading on
ecological relations, focused in the life of microorganisms.
In their situated knowledge, these works were produced as
an answer to the specific condition of water and
ecosystems in Latin America. In them, microorganisms
are visible in art as joyful acts of insurrection that allow for
a particular, less naive ecological thought, a
microbiopolitics, thinking biological matter and on the
other of a biopolitics expanded by the inclusion of ​zoe​, that
more than a superficial “green attitude”, introduces an
ecological thought for the microbial posthuman.
[7] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, T​he Mushroom at the end of the
world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2015)
[8] Rees T, Bosch T, Douglas AE ´How the microbiome
challenges our concept of self.´ ​PLoS Biol (2018) 16(2):
e2005358. ​https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005358
[9] Lynn Margulis on endosymbiosis.
[10] Roberto Kolter and Scott Chimileski, The end of
microbiologyʼ, ​Environmental Microbiology, (​ 2018) 20:6,
https://doi.org/10.1111/1462-2920.14240. Accessed 2 November
2018.
[11]McFall-Ngai, Margaret, Hadfield, Michael G., Bosch,
Thomas C. G., Carey, Hannah V., Domazet-Lošo, Tomislav,
Douglas, Angela E., Dubilier, Nicole, Eberl, Gerard, Fukami,
Tadashi, Gilbert, Scott F., Hentschel, Ute, King, Nicole,
Kjelleberg, Staffan, Knoll, Andrew H., Kremer, Natacha,
Mazmanian, Sarkis K., Metcalf, Jessica L., Nealson, Kenneth,
Pierce, Naomi E., Rawls, John F., Reid, Ann, Ruby, Edward G.,
Rumpho, Mary, Sanders, Jon G., Tautz, Diethard and
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Wernegreen, Jennifer J. (2013), Animals in a bacterial world, a
new imperative for the life scienceʼ ​PNAS​, 110:9, pp.3229-3236.
[12] Paxson, Heather, Post-Pasteurian Cultures: The
Microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United Statesʼ,
Cultural Anthropology​ (2008), 23:1.
[13] Gilberto Esparza, et.al. ​Cultivos​. (Mexico: CONACULTA,
2014).
[14] Interview with Gilberto Esparza, San Miguel de Allende,
January 2018.
[15] Alfred North Whitehead, ​Process and reality: an essay in
cosmology​, (New York: Free Press, (1978).
[16] T. J. Demos, ​Decolonizing nature: contemporary art and the
politics of ecology. (​Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016).
[17]María Fernández, ed. ​Latin American Modernisms and
Technology​, ( Cornell Institute for Comparative Modernities,
ICM :Africa World Press, 2018)
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Author Biography
Mariana Pérez Bobadilla is an Art Historian specialized in the
intersections of art, science, and technology, particularly in the
Mexican media art scene. She received an Erasmus Mundus
Scholarship to study a master in Gender Studies at the University
of Bologna, Italy, researching Feminist Epistemology and
Contemporary Art. She has presented her work at ISEA, EVA,
ISCMA, the Ammerman Symposium of Art and Science, and has
been involved in the Mexican Pavilion of the 56th Venice
Biennale. Her academic training includes courses with Rosi
Braidotti, and the international curators’ course of the 2014
Gwangju Art Biennale, in South Korea. Awarded by the Hong
Kong Ph.D. Fellowship Scheme, her research in the School of
Creative Media revolves around art and biology, epistemology,
history of science, new materialism, biohacking, wetware, and
bacteria.