Gutscapes: thinking and sensing the more-than-human body

For the Being Human festival this year, CBSS has created a series of events, one of them is an artscience event called Gutscapes, a collaboration between Joana Formosinho, Research Fellow in social studies of science (STS) at CBSS; and artists Baum & Leahy, currently Arts Fellows at CBSS. With Gutscapes, we aim to share microbiome research with publics in its social and scientific dimensions; and to do this experientially. We are asking questions like: What is it like to experience your body as a more-than-human phenomenon: a holobiont? How might that change your sense of self and belonging within the living world? How do we make sense of being human, when our bodies are, in fact, in part microbial? 

Microbial matters

We also have a strong focus on the materiality of the gut mucosal wall— which is a fascinating structure maintaining the integrity of the more-than-human body. The mucosa is a gelatinous, carbohydrate-rich structure. It acts as a home for our resident microbes and simultaneously creates a barrier between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Many microbial communities live within the confines of our gut mucosa, and they are also held at bay there: the dense slime preventing the microbes from circulating into our bloodstream. It is an environment inside our body: an inside/outside. This perceptual challenge of thinking—or seeing—beyond binary categories is another core aspect of our artscience experiment. The human as more-than-human. The body as an environment. 

Beyond the binary

Provoking binaries of thought is a core aspect of this event. As researchers and artists thinking and making together, we posed ourselves a methodological challenge. Instead of approaching the human holobiont as an abstract entity, a new unit of host + microbiota, let us tell its story through its material composition; its bodily contours. How is the human body, structurally speaking, shaped through its metabolic imbrication with microbes? This way of storytelling allows us to move beyond binaries (human/ non-human) and instead focus on the structures and processes that make a human ‘I’ which is also a more-than-human ‘We’. 

A thought-provoking and sensory experience

Another methodological challenge we set ourselves is the construction of a space where publics are invited to into a collective and individual experience; an experience that is simultaneously thinking, feeling and sensing. We start with some storytelling—a nod to our host venue, the Scottish Storytelling Centre. Using scientific imagery, we introduce participants to some of the protagonists that shape the story of our holobiont gut. After that, we invite participants to journey into the inner landscape of the gut, through a guided visual journey. We also use tactile elements to create the right atmosphere— organically shaped eye masks, one of them soft, pink, tube-shaped and roughly the length of the human small intestine, which winds across participants. After that, we all eat together, experiencing eating and digestion as a more-than-human process. Throughout the event, there are spaces for reflection: first individually and then collectively. There is also a quiet space booked for us elsewhere within the venue, should anyone want to take a break from this collectivity. 

Crafting an experience

Our objective in designing Gutscapes is to create an experience of the body as ecology. To encourage participants to think otherwise about categories like human vs. non-human. To introduce the concept of holobiont as a thought-figure; and to think, sense and reflect together, as a community.

The participatory, democratic impulse is core to our work. We want to share academic knowledges beyond ivory towers, and to share them, not as a finished products but as a knowledges-in-the-making; full of facts yes, but facts that won’t hold still. Facts which are also a collective cultural experience, and subject to refinement.