These Relations Are Forever

These Relations Are Forever is an immersive video installation that uses endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDC’s) as a thematic thread through the practices of four women researchers, bringing together agricultural policy, toxicology, water quality research and environmental law around a common theme of chemical pollution. 

Emerging from a two-year art–science collaboration with the researchers Caterina Cacciatori, Sandra Coecke and Irene Guerrero from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy and Saskia Vermeylen from the Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, the work transforms scientific methods and policy language into site-based rituals performed by the researchers. Filmed across a harvested cornfield, a laboratory, a pond and a remediation facility the four rituals open up speculative spaces to explore scientific and embodied ways of knowing, inviting multidisciplinary responses beyond technoscientific structures.  In these rituals, methods from dominant scientific practices are woven with spoken text, movement, and symbolic locations and objects.  The work is presented as a four-channel video installation with spatial sound, with each of the four screens representing one of the researchers and their ritual.

This project was facilitated and funded by the European Commission Joint Research Centre as part of the SciArt Resonances IV program – NaturArchy