Holobiontism is my life – it is not just my body or my evo-devo- onto-eco- geno-immuno- — . 2 It is what I am and what I do. I am one of a handful of humans on the planet who is in love with Candida albicans, a yeast, one species of the hundreds that live in the ecosystems of the human body. We have co-evolved; human bodies are the ecological niche of C. albicans. Holobiontism is companionship and hosting: we are the host for C. albicans, providing them with food and shelter. Hosting implies a response-ability to the stranger. However, the microbiopolitics between Homo sapiens and C. albicans (as between many other members of our microbiome) is complex and brutal.
In 2012, I was completely transfigured by the news that our bodies were only 10% human 3 (recently revised to 50%). 4 Originally trained in biotechnology, I was already fascinated by and making artwork that explored the aesthetics involved in caring for the other-than- human organisms used in scientific research – those organisms that stand in for the human, that we use to learn about ourselves. I was particularly interested in the pests, the unappreciated, the uncharismatic – fruitflies, moulds, weeds, and C. albicans – and the behaviours involved in keeping them alive (as scientists do) or in killing them (as most of us do). This process involved de-humanising myself, or more accurately, coming to understand the human as composed of more-than- human naturecultures. However, I still thought of the human as an anatomical, physiological, genetic, immunological, developmental and evolutionary individual. The revelation of the microbiome shattered me – I wasn’t becoming: I already was. Already a teeming, seething, crowd. Always already multiple, always already symbiotic.
The vertigo of this understanding was utterly thrilling. Rather than a sublime terror, I experienced a profound relief, a joy in the sensual complexity of my myriad body. I now make art that gestures towards this erotic abyss, not just towards the Homo, but also towards the Candida. What is it like to slide through the moist, warm folds of a human body; to caress and manipulate, but never see, the Other; to gorge on food and multiply without restraint; to ooze and slip over surfaces and breach cell walls in frenzied fecundity; to elongate and distend your body and twine around obstacles; to change sex in order to have sex; to be ruptured by antifungals and macrophages?
I am delighted and content to be a holobiont, a companion species. It makes perfect sense to me that we are sites of sustenance for non-human life, coagulations of opportunistic evolution and trans-ecological kinships.
– https://tarshbates.com/
2 “Evo-devo” or Evolutionary Developmental Biology integrates the processes of evolution (changes in a population as its members reproduce and die) and development (changes in an organism over the course of its life), rather than seeing the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection. Symbiosis is an important aspect of “Eco-evo- devo” or Ecological Evolutionary Developmental Biology, which emphasises the roles of ecology and development in evolution. Donna Haraway stresses the entanglement of naturecultural evolution by extending this to “eco-evo- devo-techno(logical)- histo(rical)-psycho(logical).” By using “evo-devo- onto-eco-geno-immuno- — “, I refer to this legacy of acknowledging entanglements and to the categories of body referred to by Gilbert in his lecture. The “– -“ allows for other “o’s” including techno, histo, psycho, micro…”
3 D.C. Savage (1977), "Microbial Ecology of the Gastrointestinal Tract", Annual Review of Microbiology, 31.
4 http://www.nature.com/news/scientists-bust- myth-that- our-bodies- have-more- bacteria-than- human-cells- 1.19136