Louise Westerhout

In contemporary art and the biomedical complex, medical anthropologist Mutsawashe Mutendi and artists Stacy Hardy and Louise Westerhout explore ways in which their work engages with the biomedical complex and might be seen applied as forms of decolonial practice against a system borne from extractivism and the racial Anthropocene. This episode of Intra-actions examines the biopolitics of disease. Filmed within the Adler Museum of Medicine, different installations provided the frames for the content of each scene.

The pharmacy scene explores the pharmaceutical–industrial complex and begins from Derrida’s premise that pharmaceutics are simultaneously remedy, poison and scapegoat. Experiences of access, and how race, class and geography play roles in selective healing and systemic neglect, and the commodification of “cure” in a capitalist system are discussed. Participants examine how the pharmaceutical industry historically fueled colonialism through appropriation of indigenous knowledge systems and exploitative extraction of natural resources for medicine. The breathing machine scene links the poetry and politics of breath to larger geopolitical structures—mining, industrial labour and the racialised history of respiratory diseases like tuberculosis affecting marginalised communities. Breathing and breath is explored as a decolonial strategy in African and indigenous spiritual practices, as an act of reclamation in protest or music, and as a form of feminist resistance against patriarchal structures. The optometry scene centers on treatment systems and the violence of the gaze. The pathologisation of black bodies and female bodies is traced to the invisibility of illnesses including mental health syndromes. This topic continues into the consulting room scene which links the violence of the gaze to diagnostic systems. Consent and agency become the lens through which to interrogate how diagnostics stigmatises certain bodies, and the way the state and society inscribe disease on certain populations as a form of biopolitical control. The “specialist” and “cure” mentality of Western medicine is contrasted to indigenous holistic, restorative and community-based practices. The video concludes with a contribution of a more generous practice of care that might evolve to embody a medicine that cares not just for the body, but for the soul, the community and the environment.

Intra-actions is a series of engagements that bring together scientists and technologists, bio-artists and -designers, legal and humanitarian practitioners, historians and anthropologists, architects, writers and curators to reflect on the intra-action of their work.