Taking the non-human other seriousley: Exploring interspecies domestic relationships through the aesthetic of care

In the last two years I have become a foster carer to a 12 year old cat, Gato. I have kicked him in the head as he weaves through my legs to be fed every single morning of these two years: neither of us have fully adapted to the movements of the other through space, often resulting in me tripping and grabbing at furniture in a slapstick attempt to prevent injury to either myself or Gato. This daily clumsy dance is in stark contrast with my previous cat who was part of my family from a kitten and who I never kicked in the head. Two years has not been long enough for Gato and me to become habituated to each other’s movements, although his steadfast refusal to change his behaviour has caused some acrobatic changes of mine. This creative research project aims to contribute to considerations of human/non-human relationships by exploring behaviours implicit in domestic relationships between humans and two ubiquitous, non-vertebrate species: the European honeybee, Apis mellifera, and the yeast Candida albicans (thrush) which is commensal to human digestive and urogenital tracts. Non-vertebrates – insects, plants, fungi and bacteria – are by far the most prevalent species
humans encounter. They present few points of resemblance for us to respond to or empathise with. These organisms are easy to dismiss, backdrops to  human experience. Despite this they are integral to intricate ecologies on which human survival depends and which we are rapidly destroying. This project proposes to explore how humans behave in encounters with non-vertebrates: how do we respond to other creatures if we can barely see them? Investigations of human/animal encounters have become increasingly important in understanding how we conceive of the human. This project proposes to extend and challenge these investigations by exploring our ubiquitous and unacknowledged relationships with even more radically nonhuman species than the domestic cat – the insects and fungi that we rely on. Humans are embedded in multi-species, domestic, every day, lived environments – our homes, farms, scientific laboratories. Encounters in these environments are so familiar and habitual that the organisms and the behaviours associated with them become invisible. Even our bodies are a mammal / fungi / bacteria / insect / viral ecology which we rarely acknowledge: a normal human body is said to be composed of over 1014 cells, of which only about 10% are animal. As the most common sites of human/non-human encounters and as spaces where species boundaries become increasingly blurred, domestic environments provide complex, vital and to date,  understudied knowledge of the material effects of drawing boundaries between species. Domestic encounters with A. mellifera and C. albicans are fundamentally aesthetic experiences – embodied engagements that elicit physiological, emotional and cognitive responses. Furthermore, care is implicit in domestic engagements: care of, care for, care about. The aesthetic experiences of care are sensual, relational, temporal and often unconscious. A. mellifera is a relatively benign, intensively farmed insect which supports horticultural production. In contrast C. albicans is an opportunistic pathogen of humans. Consequently, care encounters with each of these species involve different characteristics. This project aims to  explicate the aesthetic experiences involved in care of, for and about A. mellifera and C. albicans in order to facilitate understanding of boundaries drawn between humans and non-vertebrates during domestic engagements. This project combines the quantitative empiricism of the scientific method, the qualitative subjectivity of feminism and anthropology and the heuristic, embodied aesthetics of creative research in order to make apparent the material effects of drawing boundaries between species. This interdisciplinarity allows for understandings, experiences and knowledge production beyond the written or the verbal and into the phenomenological, through artistic production. It takes up Deleuze’s and Guattari’s call to engage in “a creative shift from the anthropocentric spatio-temporal world” through artistic research into the domestic relationships between humans and non-vertebrates. Understanding and reinterpreting physical and sensual interactions is essential to explore embodied interspecies encounters and the material effects of human/non-human boundary formation, and as Donna Haraway suggests temporality is fundamental to “comprehending all the possibilities activated” by companion species.