These Relations Are Forever

How do we live with our chemically altered bodies? What are the words, actions and protocols that might adequately honour chemical relations?

‘These Relations Are Forever’ is a collaboration with four women researchers, Caterina Cacciatori (JRC), Sandra Coecke (JRC), Irene Guerrero (JRC), Saskia Vermeylen (Strathclyde University), funded by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Following the thematic thread of endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC’s) the work explores the interconnections of their four research practices, bodies and landscapes.

In this four-channel video installation, Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDC’s) – and their
increasingly frequent and lasting presence within our bodies and lives, via food, soil, and
water – are the thematic thread through the scientific practices of four women researchers.
The work brings together agricultural policy, toxicology, water quality research,
environmental law, and art around the common theme of chemical pollution.
Four screens face each other, forming a square across which each researcher personally
performs their ritual. The women communicate, stepping up to symbolically take part in
each of the four rituals at key moments, showing support across time and space.
In these rituals, methods from dominant scientific practices are woven together with spoken
text, movement and symbolic locations and objects. We use ritual as a tool to create a
moment outside of everyday life, to slow down, be present and show gratitude and to
acknowledge the alterations chemicals make to bodies and ecosystems.

Each of the researchers personally developed and performed the ceremony representing their research. In these rituals, methods from dominant scientific practice are woven with spoken text, movement and actions of care, becoming new tools for knowledge production. In these films the researchers are holders of knowledge and protectors of life; their scientific practices are re-framed as relations of care and ritual becomes a vehicle to make connections across bodies, scales, cycles and scientific disciplines, offering a way of staying with our troubles (Haraway, 2016) whilst envisioning alternative ways of being in the world.