Scottish Gut Project: 'Living Together' Film Screening
Join the Scottish Gut Project for 'Living Together', a special film screening with Q&A as part of the 'Modernity and the Gut' Symposium.
School of Modern Languages & Cultures | College of Arts | Scottish Gut Project
Date: Friday 28 April 2023
Time: 18:00 - 20:00
Venue: Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre
Category: Conferences, Films and theatre, Academic events, Student events
Maria Fernandez Pello | Lucy Beech | Roz Mortimer | Jenna Sutela | Kirsty Hendry | A+E Collective
By bacterial timescales we have only just acquired the language and technology to identify the microbial critters that our bodies are built around, but the gut has long been held as the site where ‘I’ is at its most vulnerable. Variously thought of as harbouring animal spirits, demons, fugitive lodgers, noxious humours, and now millions of bacteria, the gut is where the membrane between self and other is at its flimsiest.
The relationship between our human and non-human selves is often described as symbiotic. Yet ‘symbiosis’—a biological term used to describe a connection between two organisms—is often used as a synonym for balance, harmony, and equilibrium, glossing over the complexity of both the term itself and the complexity of our kinship with the non-human world. No relationship is ever so straightforward; as poet Daisy Lafarge writes ‘I had to keep reminding myself that parasitism was a type of symbiotic relationship and not its opposite’.
Featuring works by Maria Fernandez Pello, Lucy Beech, Roz Mortimer, Jenna Sutela, and Kirsty Hendry, Living Together explores digesting, ingesting, and metabolising as practices of self-making and unmaking. The works in Living Together exploit scale to reveal the complex dramas that unfold beyond the limits of human perception; internal life and interior spaces might also contain outer-spaces and other worlds. Living Together dwells on the idea that our understanding of what is internal/external, inside/outside, self/other is maybe a question of perspective?
Following the screening programme, Scottish Gut Project Artist Kirsty Hendry will share a short trailer for Human Nature - a forthcoming moving work produced in response to the collective ruminations of the Scottish Gut Project. Kirsty will be joined by A+E Collective and a very special guest for a Q+A and discussion.
Supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and Creative Scotland and presented as part of the Scottish Gut Project 'Modernity and the Gut' Symposium.