Final exhibition

Art4Med projects shown in the More Than Living exhibition at the Cité internationale des arts (Paris) from September 28 to October 22 2022, in the frame of Open Source Body festival.

More details on the website : opensourcebody.eu

Edito

In Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction novel The More Than Human (1953), a group of humans with unusual disabilities and powers enter into a symbiotic relationship to create a self-sustaining living organism, composed of several individuals.
This concept of “More-Than-Human” is taken up today in environmental philosophy to counter the nature-culture dualism and the hegemonic exceptionalism of the human.
If the exhibition “More Than Living” marks the need to feel more alive than ever in a post COVID-19 society, it also invites us to take a renewed look, “More Than Human”, at our existences in the terrestrial environment.
Based on multiple atmospheric, evolutionary, affective and bodily studies, the artists lead us to rethink our sensitive relationship to our environment, as well as the gestures and narratives of our evolutionary becoming. Inspired by this renewal of cultural geography in the time of global warming and mass extinctions, More Than Living makes perceptible the vulnerabilities shared between species.
Today we observe a strengthening of technological aids to medical practice, removing more and more the direct contact between the doctor and his patient. Nearly 40 years ago, philosopher and primatologist Donna Haraway introduced a feminist critique of the “cyborg body. Her vision continues to accompany artists when addressing the robotization and technologization of reproduction, prosthetics or body augmentation, and the relationship between a certain militaristic vision of the body developed in science fiction and the medical science in the making.
Finally, the exhibition examines how certain social groups or individuals can be coerced, stigmatised or disenfranchised in a normative society.

Ewen Chardronnet & Nataša Petresin-Bachelez