Appealing to Morin´s moan. Life without life. (English Version)

Appealing to Morin´s moan. Life without life.

Johanna Caplliure

« L’inclusion du vivant dans l’humain et de l’humain dans le vivant nous permet de concevoir la notion de vie dans sa plénitude ».
Edgar Morin, La méthode. La vie de la vie.

The permanent moan of thinkers, researchers, as well as activists and artists becomes a litany of dirges inspired by the loss of life.  Life has vanished from the agendas as far as praxis and scientific research policies are concerned.  Studies pursue to excel in technological sophistication and hi-tech prophylaxis of the human being, but altogether forgetting human kind is the very object and subject of those studies.  It seems that is the overuse of the microscope that provokes certain shortsightedness while the stereoscope causes a latent far-sightedness (hypermetria).  Without being completely blind, both could account for the evil of science, a thorough destruction of peripheral observation over matters related to intercommunication among sciences.  Microscopic observation invites us to live in a world of helicoidal objects while the telescopic one attracts nebulae of a blinding light. Among objects of infinite beauty, science loses its essence: life itself.

Those thinkers that moan about the loss of a life, long that a multiple dimension catalyst be discovered inside the moan, thus opening new approaches to research into the living.  Science would then be evolving and making continual progress and change towards humankind.  This irreparable loss of the living as the object of study and focus of action is of paramount interest in the works of Tania Blanco. Thus, l´enjeux in her works depicts life returning throughout a science which focuses on humankind, taking into account the cultural aspects and the fact of being a living entity.  An ecological science, or eco-science that s to say, and ecological system that shapes the “ecumene humano” or potentially inhabitable world between the macro and the micro, the cultural and the natural, between the animal, vegetal, mineral and the human, between science and the critics.  Therefore the eco-science that T.Blanco suggests brings with it a vision of a renewed awareness. A “science with awareness” resonates the echo of Edgar Morin´s voice.

The science with awareness that Tania Blanco claims self sustains itself and is totally aware of the living.  In her paintings she raises the alarm and renovation is openly encouraged.  I can feel it day in, day out, the way she explores her work, which seems subject to the realm of biomedical studies.  And so, life presents itself as a constant threat but also as a permanent promise of salvation cited in a laboratory.  We give in to the narration of science.  The epic narratives do not have Greek heroes as the main characters that fight against monsters.  Now the war is waged against microbiological agents who lead to a confrontation that the human being always ends up losing.  Science becomes a tool to neutralize the threat and to carry out the pledge.  Nevertheless, hopes and fears lying in biomedical technology do not seem to put our future at ease.

The techno-science that has been developed to cover man´s needs and supply markets seems to bring changes closer.  However it is a trick that leads to a weakening of the living.  Criticism to the abandonment of a more humane practice represents one of the main pillars of our artist´s works, which is one of her most recognizable points.  In fact, the human figures that appear in Tania Blanco´s works become place and tool to depict techno-science, the studies of laboratories undergoing genetics engineering, the marketing of pharmaceutical companies, the ownership of both telluric and bodily terrains as well as fears and individual and collective longings.  Blanco´s concerns are coincident with those of Donna Haraway´s or Judy Wajcman, or Lynn Randolph´s works about the Oncomouse®, the first animal patented by Harvard University to study breast cancer.  Therefore, "any interesting creature inside techno-science such us a textbook- a molecule, an equation, a mouse, a pippet, a pump, a fungus, a technician, an agitator or a scientist may and should sometimes be openly torn to shreds in order to display the sticky strings with which they spin their tissues"[1].  And this is depicted in her paintings, a team of cloned analysts, a lab technician, a fake epithelial cell or the woman who is inoculated by a hummingbird created by technologists, with a critical mind, an eco-spirit and a science in action.  Tania Blanco carries out an autopsy on the complex framework of science, its practices and its solutions that warn us against an undesirable development if we abandon life within life.

[1]   Haraway, Donna J. Testigo-Modesto@.Segundo-Milenio. HombreHembra _Conoce_Oncoraton. Feminismo y tecnociencia. Barcelona, UOC, 2004, p. 88