Transcroporeality

Transcroporeality is a trial of immersive multi-modal work incorporating smell and video related to the Anthropocene, microplastics, hybrid geology, and late industrialisms. Transcorporeality, as termed by feminist science studies scholar Stacy Alaimo, is the recognition that "the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world," and that the materiality of our bodies is porous, hybrid, and inseparable from “the environment.” Most information about ecological demise is depicted through data or visuals, and this installation attempts to prioritize more embodied contact points with Anthropogenic changes to the environment. 

Hanging censurs fill the atmosphere of Studio 1 with smell—a sense that bypasses cognition, more directly activating emotion and memory. The subjectivity and corporeality of olfaction does not preclude it from being a valid form of knowledge of our environment, and in fact, may be a benefit to understanding the lived realities of ecological collapse. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smell was a legitimate way to understand environmental changes, as toxic industrial pollution was frequently reported via its noxious odor. Smell provides evidence of manufactured risks that may be unperceived by the naked eye, pervasive in late industrialisms.