m/other becomings 2021–2022

Lyndsey Walsh and Riina Hannula selected for the m/other becomings project
posted by Johanna Salmela on 24 August 2021

Last spring, we were calling for artwork production proposals for our m/other becomings programme, seeking projects exploring reproductive futures and the ways life sciences transform and challenge our ideas and possibilities of reproduction and the maternal. We’re now excited to announce the selected artists, Lyndsey Walsh and Riina Hannula, whose new commissioned works will be featured in the m/other becomings exhibition organised in Helsinki in spring 2022!

Self-Care (A Working Title) by Lyndsey Walsh is a confrontation with the inheritance of bodily trauma and the impact of the medical gaze on the so-called female body. The work is an attempt to break the cycle of familial trauma and bodily trauma related to genetic-based diseases, while queering notions of body image and exploring potential visions of “m/otherhood”. 

Lyndsey Walsh is an American artist, researcher, and writer based in Berlin, DE. She is ½ of the feral art collab Crawlers, social media manager and creative producer for the Unbore Collective, adjunct professor at the Art & Science Centre at ITMO University, and a visiting scholar at Department of Experimental Biophysics at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

Riina Hannula’s more-than-human practice of care with goats listens-looks-senses other animals that have become with us humans via the long history of domestication. Hannula’s project Agential Guts speculates how to co-live respecting goats as companion animals and to embody multispecies situations beyond utility value. Microbes bind our animal bodies together, making space for becomings that perhaps escape the traditional hierarchies set up by men. The project tries to find the guts to make sense of ancient microbial wisdom. 

Hannula are an artist working with video, sound, live situations and installation. They are also doing a PhD in social sciences in the Microbial Lives: Practices of New Human-Microbial Cultures project. Hannula's doctoral thesis combines science and technology studies with art-based research in the emerging field of microbial sociology. 

Images: Lyndsey Walsh's sketch for the project Self-Care above; Riina Hannula's photo below.

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m/other becomings cultivates intergenerational and multispecies methodologies, making space for the investigation of domestic resistance practices and probing technologies of reproduction, resilience, and recuperation. It is a collaboration between Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology (DK), The Association for Arts and Mental Health (DK), Kultivator (SE)Art Lab Gnesta (SE), and Bioart Society (FI). 

m/other becomings is generously supported by Bikuben Fonden, The Nordic Culture Fund, and A.P. Møller Fonden.