Life with Flies: Sarcophaga Bullata & Ecstatic Decay

2024 - Ongoing

Unlike the rest of my work to date, the primary medium of this project is lived experience - connection, communication, and collaboration across species. From March through June of 2024, I did my best to live with and care for hundreds of Sarcophaga Bullata flesh flies in my apartment. They are carrion eaters - some of the first macro-organisms to appear on a corpse, post-death. They are also critical pollinators. You can purchase them through some scientific and medical supply companies, because they’re used by humans in environmental and forensic science, as well as wound debridement. 

I brought these beings into my home out of an interest in gaining intimacy the inexorable reality of decay, and moreover, the possibility of decay as an immutable, transformative force that, precisely through its abjection, might offer a threshold into other ways of being, relating, and envisioning the future in this time of mass death. I imagined decay as a potentially ecstatic thing - it disrupts “all the boundaries between me and not-me.” (Lykke 2021) - an ecstatic threshold, which literally fragmentx the one into many. An intra-relational (Barad 2007) and inhuman (Braidotti 2013) multiplicity that offers the possibility to “transcend oneself,” (Britannica 2023) and recognize the co-constancy of life and death in all things.

And so I fed the flies my blood. In a very literal way, the blood the flies consumed allows me to experience myself as a part of lives beyond me, decoupled from any insistence on a renewed life or rebirth. What is the potential of this afterlife? 

This work is ongoing - I’ve learned a lot from my time with the flies, and I hope and expect to continue collaborating, and negotiating the complex biopolitical dynamics of our relationship, moving forward.

Larvae:

Flies: