Grants and residencies

Research and art

Re Re Re to Infinity: Post-Internet Litanies on Reproductive Work

Re Re Re to Infinity: Post-Internet Litanies on Reproductive Work is a live monument-exhibition that re-values and remembers reproductive work as a vital public service. Since the 1970s contemporary art has served as a site to visibilise forms of devalued work, such as the domesticated tasks involved in socially reproducing the work force. These feminist actions also situated art as an ‘institution of reproduction’ that generates the conditions of visibility for certain activities to be legible as work or non-work; reproductive or productive. The project responds to the current context of Europe, where new forms of devalued reproductive work are concentrated in cities such as Helsinki, Barcelona and London, through their roles as digital hubs, capitals of culture and centers of reproductive tourism. My artistic research consists of critical and creative components: the critical thesis theorizes reproductive work after the internet through a combined cyberfeminist, reproductive justice and queer Marxist lense, while my artistic project develops a queer and anti-racist post-internet aesthetics. This research challenges the academic and chronological enclosing of cyberfeminist, post-internet, queer and net.art as completed and indeed divided movements, theorising instead a series of intentional tactics responding to specific modes of neoliberal governance.

This artistic research contributes to the interdisciplinary study of reproduction by developing a Queer Marxist perspective on the digital “fixed capital” of assisted reproduction; and by centring Net Art, poetry, film and video practice–including the researcher’s own– as a fundamental way of knowing about the transformation of reproductive biologies since the 1970s. The doctoral thesis develops the concept of “post-internet queer reproductive work” to address the dynamic relationship between past social struggles around sexuality and reproduction and the computational and networked technologies (for example, websites and algorithms) that saturate the Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) market today. Broadly, the research shows how the interface, the network and the viral have been taken up by artists and poets as themes and modes of artistic response to reproductive governance.