Wet-Togetherness [6]—Transfusing: Iván L. Munuera, P. Staff and Himali Singh Soin presented by Shanghai Biennale

Bodies exceed humanity. They remind us that we are part of something vaster—and smaller—more complex, more connected than our mere existence as an atomized species. Our bodies, and bodies in general, are comprised of heterogeneity and multitudes. All bodies are wet collective bodies defined by how they link to other bodies, places, environments, technologies. Think of breathing, clogging, decomposing, discharging, flushing, lubricating, melting, menstruating, transfusing. Bodies exist as trans- and extra-territorial beings. They live in hybridity. This porous condition produces a planetary wet-togetherness, a “commoning” force that constitutes all bodies as collective hydro-subjects. Wet-Togetherness is a collaboration between e-flux and the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water, curated by Andrés Jaque, Marina Otero Verzier, Lucia Pietroiusti, Filipa Ramos, and YOU Mi, and organized and promoted by the Power Station of Art. It consists of nine sound pieces in which 21 artists, activists, and researchers enact aqueousness through sound. The series has been edited by José Luis Espejo and Rubén Coll, with sound design by Tomoko Sauvage, coordination by Roberto González García, and locutions by Yang Yang. Episode 6. Transfusing: With three sound pieces by scholar Iván L. Munuera and artists P. Staff and Himali Singh Soin Bodies are permeable. They exist in continuous fluid exchange with other bodies. Yet fluids circulate differently than the bodies to which they once belonged. They pass from one body to another body, merging stories, fates, futures. They fuse health, life, or their opposite. Fluids replace components; they add something that is lacking or is desired. Fluids are given, passed onto, injected, poured, infiltrated in a sometimes unavowed hydro commons. Iván L. Munuera talks about blood transfusion. Blood transfusion carries a notion of “body” far from the definition of a discrete and autonomous being. It states an environmental recomposition that pushes for interdependent, interconnected, and not zipped-up embodiments. In their work, P. Staff interrogates the often uncomfortable interdependency and extraction of bio-commodities, both human and other, between body and institution, liquid, and solid. The material dimension of collective life becomes the site where structural violence, registers of harm, and the corrosive effects of acid, blood, and hormones can be explored and enacted. Himali Singh Soin explores the elements of the earth, their reverberations in the body and the inter-scalar exchanges between them. Here she tells the story of a search for a lost bla, a subtle life force that runs through the world-body that has lost itself amid the crisis of the present moment.