Decaying Preservation: Lessons from Flesh Flies
TECHNOETIC ARTS JOURNAL
awaiting publication
ABSTRACT:
Last spring, I cared for hundreds of decomposers—grey flesh flies (sarcophaga bullata)—in my apartment and fed them my blood. By experiencing decomposition through them, I aimed to learn what can result from allowing for endings, mess, and rot, rather than preserving my body and environment from such contagions. Determinations of risk commonly aim to define and preserve what is perceived as natural and progressive against defiling and entropic forces. But decay doesn’t fit into this false dichotomy. As the flies and I lived, died, and decomposed together, I confronted the ways in which they challenged my preconceptions of the pure and impure. My blood decomposed in them, intimately entangling our bodies, and when I opened the window to let them leave, they dispersed my DNA out into the world. Our interrelations suggest that meeting risk means allowing for excessive, strange, even repellent metamorphoses. Cross-culturally, flies are some of the most despised organisms regularly encountered, precisely due to their role in decomposition. This art-research experiment has taught me that, against our understandings of future ecological and political change as necessitating a return to a pristine past or clean future, the transformations we need require leaning into kinship with contamination.