Resisting Separation: Reflecting on the Value of Death and Cross-species Connection in Future Food System

In this presentation, artist Svenja Kratz considers the ethical and ideological implications of separating organisms from broader environmental systems and proposing futures based on the continued mastery of nature and an extractive, anthropocentric ethics. Using her creative practice and interest in immortality as a starting point for discussion, she draws parallels between transhumanist visions of engineered immortality and food futures based on more efficient and increasingly environmentally decontextualised modes of technological production. She argues that both propositions are predicated on the view of humans as separate (or separable) from nature and uphold a reductionist and human centred approach with limited regard for the more-than-human communities that compose all living (and non-living) systems.