The workshop draws on Amanda’s artwork and research into the ancient practice of extispicy, divination using the entrails, to explore the thresholds between our bodies, and in particular our guts, and the natural and built environment, to re-conceptualise these seemingly boundaried entities. Amanda will introduce her artwork, and the practice of extispicy, and guide participants through activities to explore and problematise human-environment binaries. Participants will be directed to explore their immediate locale to perceive and gather materials that resemble intestines, for example, a disembowelling cable from a telephone exchange box; tree roots surfacing from beneath the ground; or coiled piping awaiting transplantation during road excavations. By noticing the hidden infrastructure of our immediate locale, we might also experience our insides within, conceptually and visually re-connecting the idea of the gastrointestinal tract being at the same time inside the body, and part of the external environment, outside the body border. Reconvening participants will share and discuss the materials and images collected whilst we eat a snack together. Participants will be invited to prepare a dish in advance, that for them, evokes the gut. It could be gut-friendly: yoghurt, sauerkraut; sausages, i.e. made from the actual gut as a casing; or formed by coils or convolutions, palmier biscuits, liquorice wheels, Swiss roll, (recipe suggestions could be sent beforehand). Through the act of eating, and subsequent digestion, absorption and excretion, we will enact a collapsing of human-world binaries, disrupting the false dichotomies and boundaries of inside and outside.
