Transformative Bodies

The Body Concepts series is based on the principle of transdisciplinary encounters. The session begins with a lecture by Elliot Evans, followed by a dialogue with artist Jen Rosenblit.

LECTURE BY ELLIOT EVANS: HIV is neither pure matter nor metaphor, nor even a combination of the two. Rather,  it is ‘intra-action’ between multiple strains of virus; human and non-human agents; individual state biopolitics and global biocapital. It also traces the afterlives of colonialism and neocolonialism; religious discourse; medical research; homophobia and racism. Likewise, while often imagined as purely cellular materiality, blood is laden with metaphors of class, race and lineage; health and disease; vitality and death. Blood is certainly not an ‘object’, but neither is it fully ‘subject’; acting akin to Haraway’s prosthetic in questioning the body’s borders and probing the line between inside/outside.

Their talk HIV. Journey in Blood will explore the transformation of blood via the journeys it makes inside and outside of human and non-human bodies: the transspecies journey of HIV from ape to human; the transatlantic journey of the virus; and the transactional journey of human blood exported from periphery to centre through companies like Hemo-Caribbean, which underlines that under biocapitalism, certain bodies are quite literally worth less than others. It will converse with visual art to offer a historically situated, new materialist analysis of HIV and blood, and of viral transmission as continual journeying.