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Hosting the Inhuman: anthology

A collection of articles accompanying the exhibition “Hosting the Inhuman”.

Editors
Maria Kramar and Karen Sarkisov

Authors
Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Eduardo Batalha Viveiros de Castro, Oxana Timofeeva, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing

The anthology “Hosting the Inhuman” is published to accompany the eponymous V–A–C exhibition, dedicated to the mutual relationship between material objects, non-human life forms and the environment.

The book “Hosting the Inhuman” includes articles by humanitarian researchers and anthropologists who address the issues of non-human agency using the example of various topics: from the cosmology of the Amazon tribes to the symbiotic interdependence of fungi and other species. The collection combines a multitude of discourses: natural-scientific principles of crystallography, or bioinformatics are combined with parascientific theses of cryptozoology or UFOlogy, parallels that appear between the ideas of contemporary continental philosophy and the spiritual culture of native Americans (the essay of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), and the way that questions tormenting the heroine of "Sex and the City", find their reflection in the computer algorithms of the behaviour of materials (in Sara Culmann’s video C. A. R. R. I. E.).

In the publication there is also an interview with those who took part in the “Hosting the Inhuman” exhibition and a photo documentation of the exhibition.

The main task of the ‘Hosting the Inhuman’ project lies in this attempt to break down these barriers separating one’s own from the other, guests and hosts, the living and the dead, subject and object, mobile and immobile, human and non-human, abstract and concrete, nature and culture, science and art, active and passive.

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