A.R.T. and Poiesis

Some Poems on the Aesthetics and Linguistics of Assisted Reproductive Technologies

2013

Irini Athanassakis

That nature exists, it would be absurd to try to prove; for it is obvious that there are many things of this kind... (Aristotle, Physics)

Having children used to be considered as the most natural thing in the world. Making Life and the Creation of men however has been considered as the Science of God (la Science de Dieu) touching the sacred (and the Taboo) through the civilations. A polynesian cosmological Mythology as an example, consideres the Creation of the world and matters of (in)fertility as the same issue. “

The emphasis of the so-called the modern world on birth control as one means of body, territorial- and self-control seems opposite to the ancient rituals venerating fertiliy. Both, birth control and Assisted Reproductive Technologies (A.R.T.) have blurred nature and culture in this central field of procreation in an unprecedented way.

Where (mother) nature ends and where (fathers’ and mothers’, men’s and women’s) culture may start has now become part of the human procreation practices themselves and is questioning the individual in it`s decisions and possiblitites to procreate aswell as whole societies and populations. Some examples of the series of drawings mingling biochemical, medical, historical, gender and personal data adress some of the images, signs and words present in the A.R.T. world. Information and thoughts constitute the poems of the Bio-Logics of Making Life Possible. They reinvent the experience of a „life performance“ and set out fragments of a mind map where informations, images, words, emotions meet and co-exist.

(work in progress)

Handy, E.S.C.: Traité d’Histoire des Religions (3e éd., Paris 1959), quoted after Eliade, M.: Die Schöpfungsmythen. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag 2002 (1964 Benziger Verlag, Zürich; Originalausgabe: La naissance du monde; Paris: Editions du Seuil 1959), p.13: „Die Worte, durch die Io das All formte – das heißt durch die diese geschaffen und dazu geführt wurde, eine Lichtwelt hervorzubringen – dieselben Worte werden verwendet im Ritus der Fruchtbarmachung einer unfruchtbaren Gebärmutter...“