Marietta Radomska is a feminist philosopher and transdisciplinary Gender Studies scholar. Her research interests include: feminist theory, continental philosophy, posthumanities, bioart, eco-art, feminist science studies, queer theory, death studies, and critical animal studies, among others.
She is the co-director of The Posthumanities Hub, founder of The Eco- and Bioart Research Network, a founding member of Queer Death Studies Network, co-founder of The International Network for Ecocritical and Decolonial Research, and co-coordinator of the GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies research strand “Death Studies – Queerfeminist Materialist Perspectives” (with Nina Lykke and Tara Mehrabi).
Her current research project “Ecologies of Death…” has been funded by The Swedish Research Council’s International Postdoc Grant.
Ecologies of Death: Environment, Body and Ethics in Contemporary Art
In the contemporary context of the ecological crisis, the degradation of natural resources renders certain habitats unliveable and leads to the death of individual organisms, populations and species extinction.
While bioscience emphasises interdependency as a key characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between the human and nonhuman others, particularly evident in our approaches to death. Simultaneously, human/nonhuman relationality and the destruction of life on Earth, form some of the major concerns in contemporary art practices and emerging philosophies of extinction.
The aim of this interdisciplinary project is to examine how contemporary art explores the relations between human and environment in the context of death and extinction. By bringing into dialogue five key areas of enquiry – art, environmental humanities, feminist theory, death studies, and science – the project investigates art’s approach to the materiality and processuality of death and its potential for mobilising a more nuanced ethics of death that could account for the irreducible and multiplex character of human/nonhuman ecologies, especially needed in the context of the current environmental crisis.
