Scenes From Inside And Beyond

Lucy Lay

The human microbiome consists of microorganisms living symbiotically in and on our bodies.

This fictional archive uses the microbiome, and specifically bacteria, as a shape-shifting tool that challenges how we visualise our bodies. From a distance these objects might seem to exist within conventional teachings of biology, however, with further inspection they are questioning the very establishment they appear to belong to, showing the human as a landscape and home to infinite lifeforms.

By situating this intervention within traditional Western trajectories of scientific thought, it focuses on the challenges microbiome research poses in trying to show the body as an impermeable, contained system.

Within the archive is a collection of crafted topographical models, maps and publications that seek to blur the distinctions between body and space, posing the question: When species are living within species, and cannot survive independently of one another, where do the boundaries of a species begin or end?

In this way, the microbiome forces organisms to leak into one another and this has epistemic and ontological consequences that can invite a re-thinking of how we teach and understand relationships between the human and nonhuman.

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Website: https://lucylay.cargo.site
Email: lucylaydesigns@gmail.com

Scenes From Inside And Beyond

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