In recent years, tales of assemblages have been the subject of numerous interdisciplinary inquiries. As scientists and humanities researchers alike question preconceived notions of \u201cindividual\u201d species, organisms are more accurately understood as nodes in multifaceted networks \u2014 networks so intricate that it becomes impossible to distinguish where an organism begins and ends. Beings and matter aren\u2019t whole, they are viscous porosities. The human body is not exempt from this shift in materiality. As Donna Haraway observes, \u201cThe human genomes can be found in only about 10 % of all the cells that occupy the mundane space I call my body; the other 90 % of the cells are filled with the genomes of bacteria, fungi, protists, and such\u2026 I become an adult human being in company with these tiny messmates. To be one is always to become with many^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet<\/em> (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 4.<\/span>.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bodies are defined no longer by genetic code and ruled by a brain but as microbial ecosystems. \u201cWhy should our bodies end at the skin^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Donna J. Haraway, \u201cA Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,\u201d in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 1991), 178.<\/span> ? ” Haraway asks. Each cell, organism, and photon inhabiting our bodies and our environment is composed of what Karen Barad calls an \u201cintra-active\u201d host of others. By disrupting the emphasis on the individual, this reconfiguration of matter highlights the symbiotic webs of histories and bodies through which all life emerges.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet<\/em>(2017), anthropologist Anna Tsing and her colleagues posit monsters as useful figures for thinking of such chimeric entanglements as well as of the monstrosities committed by humans in the Anthropocene^{4<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 4 <\/a> - Heather Swanson, Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan, \u201cIntroduction: Bodies Tumbled into Bodies,\u201d in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, eds. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M1 \u2014 M12.<\/span> As humanity is faced with the COVID-19 outbreak, monstrosity is all the more apt for addressing the wonders and terrors of our enmeshment with the more-than-human. In this context, the porosity of being seems as relevant as it is unsettling. Exposing the precarity of the interconnectedness of our biological lives, the pandemic reminds us that the interspecies, microbial, and fungal equilibriums that enable all life to exist can also be dangerously unstable. Symbiotic relations are constantly renewed and negotiated, and when conditions suddenly shift, once life-sustaining relations become terrifying and even deadly. Artists have long developed practices deeply rooted in making sense of life\u2019s monstrous entanglements. One of them is Croatian artist Dora Budor. Drawing on cinema, science fiction, and architectural and cultural history, Budor\u2019s works develop as ecosystems responding to their environment inside and outside the gallery space. She exposes the ways in which matter is tightly bound in dense systems of interconnected multiplicities, hybrids, or sonorous clusters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n