The Worlds of Entanglements: Reflection on Posthumanist Ontologies in Art&Science Projects

A posthuman turn can be observed in many contemporary discourses. It is characterized by an endeavour to overcome the anthropocentric picture of the world, excluding from it the ‘gap’ between the world and human, a belief in human exclusivity, as well as the practice of organizing dichotomic systems. The article relates the theories developed by Braidotti, Haraway and Ferrando and the notion of posthuman subject to the artistic exploration of the work with nonhuman others, trees, and fungi in particular. By talking on the posthuman subject and its ontological state, but more precisely by following the way we are interacting with nonhumans within the practice of selected artists, Olga Kisseleva and Saša Spačal, what their connections to humans are, the movement towards rethinking the role of humans and acknowledging those by whom we are surrounded can be traced. Thus, artists do not formulate their notion of posthuman subject, but rather they demonstrate another approach and attitude towards nonhumans: to consider the latter, trees or fungi in our case, as partners, not to build hierarchies because the equality of the partners and to acknowledge their ‘knowledge’ we can learn from.