Agential Guts — Care and Creativity within the Messy Multi-species Assemblage

Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans.