Beyond Borders and Binaries

While divisions in the world seem to be getting sharper and sharper, for those who look closely, ever more complex realities are actually emerging. Many of these complexities have a relationship, to a greater or lesser extent, with what we think of as nature. Strangely enough, that very nature and our knowledge of it is often used to justify black-and-white and binary thinking.

Nonetheless, our understanding of life and living matter continues to deepen and expand thanks to life sciences and biotechnology, but also thanks to our willingness to broaden our 'enlightened' knowledge with the knowledge of long maligned or totally new intelligences.

For instance, there is increasing recognition of the difference between being labelled a man or a woman and feeling and being allowed to be a man, a woman and everything in between; it is better not to make the boundary between water and land nearly as hard as we certainly have done for centuries in the Netherlands, and the distinction between reason and feeling is also more fluid than we often 'think'. As 'natural' as it is for many to perceive the world in dichotomies like man/woman, water/land and ratio/feeling, they are simply not as sharp as they are often considered to be in debates. Historically opposing magnitudes, they are being increasingly expressed as sliding scales.

In Beyond Borders and Binaries, the three winning teams of the Bio Art & Design (BAD) Award 2022 all present good examples of daring to break through and enrich existing visions. So do the five recent projects by other makers that are gathered around them. They tell us about the nourishing salt of waves and the healing salt of tears, about sleep as a form of eco-activism, about old and new relationships between humans and animals, and freedom of movement in the earthly and the extraterrestrial.