LASER Talks in Lisbon: The Fantastical Stories of Lab Grown Salvation

This talk will explore the current obsession of abundance without consequence in the marriage of lab grown products with food production systems.

EVENT INFO

When: February 2nd at 2:30pm Lisbon time

Where: Instituto de Medicina Molecular, Edifício Egas Moniz, Auditório 58 - David Ferreira

Website: https://blend.imm.medicina.ulisboa.pt/en/

About BLEND project: 

In Blend, we seek to bring to the campus of the Centro Académico de Medicina de Lisboa – CAML (Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon – FMUL, Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes – iMM and Centro Hospitalar Universitário Lisboa Norte – Hospital de Santa Maria – CHULN) a set of initiatives that cross art , science and medicine. BLEND benefits from the collaboration with Ectopia, Experimental Art Laboratory.

This talk will explore the current obsession of abundance without consequence in the marriage of lab grown products with food production systems. These new technological approaches to production (that can be referred to as metabolic rift technologies), are built on the premise that we can remove and replace land (nature/natural resource) with magical technologies, not just to nourish human’s needs and desires but also to save nature itself. In other words, metabolic rift technologies nullify the processes of natural extraction and exploitation from which their reference products are derived. It will argue that the underlying aim of certain metabolic rift innovations, through science and technology, necessitates a measure of mystification.

Humans’ desire is for utopian existence in which our nutrition is abundant, unlaboured, standardised, optimised, assured and produced without exploitation and extraction of resources and their uneasy consequences. We want our food and materials to be guilt-free, divorced from immediate experience and the risk of suffering. This unrealistic wish can be simulated through an abstracted nature free existence. However, it is merely and illusion; a techno-fetishist fantasy which has shifted from the realm of fiction to the discourse of innovation, investment and salvation. Nevertheless, where the means of production are growing ever dissident from the nature we will experience a Metabolic rift. A state when a broken nature can no longer be able to sustain us.

The talk will also cover the development of the Cooking Immunology project as part of my research residency in Portugal.

Oron Catts is an artist, researcher and curator whose pioneering work with the Tissue Culture and Art Project which he established with Ionat Zurr in 1996 is considered a leading biological art project.

He is co-founder and director of SymbioticA (established in 2000), a biological art research center at The University of Western Australia. Catts was a Research Fellow in Harvard Medical School, a visiting Scholar at the Department of Art and Art History Stanford University, a Professor at Large in Contestable Design at the Royal College of Arts, London. Catts curated a dozen exhibitions, publish widely and exhibited in Centre Pompidou, MoMA, Mori Art Museum, NGV, GoMA, Ars Electronica, National Art Museum of China and more.

SPONSORS

BLEND

BLEND is a project in collaboration with Ectopia, Experimental Art Laboratory. Seeking to bring to the campus of the Centro Académico de Medicina de Lisboa – CAML (Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon – FMUL, Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes – iMM and Centro Hospitalar Universitário Lisboa Norte – Hospital de Santa Maria – CHULN) a set of initiatives that cross art, science and medicine.

https://blend.imm.medicina.ulisboa.pt/en/

ECTOPIA

Ectopia is an Experimental Art Laboratory: we are a space hosting artists from different backgrounds interested in exploring the intersection of art and science. We foster the development of collaborative projects involving artists and researchers from different fields.

https://ectopialab.org/

CAML: IMM / FMUL / CHULN

The event takes place at the Academic Medical Centre of Lisbon (CAML), with a biomedical research institute dedicated to fundamental, translational and clinical studies (Instituto de Medicina Molecular João Lobo Antunes, iMM), with a mission to improve human health; the Medical School from the UNiversity of Lisbon (FMUL); and the larges academic hospital in the country Hospital de Santa Maria that is part of the CHULN hospital centre - a public general hospital, highly differentiated in technology and knowledge, providing health care to a large population in Lisbon and the south of the country.

https://caml.pt/en/ 

https://imm.medicina.ulisboa.pt/pt-pt/#

https://www.medicina.ulisboa.pt 

https://www.chln.min-saude.pt/