tranzit.sk/

February 28, 2024 at 6 p.m.
Youtube livestream
Moderated by Hana Janečková

The event will be held in English.


Living human fetuses, conceptualized as genetically “authored” private property, are among the many commodities whose manufacture can now be outsourced to the Global South under capitalism. One of the locations where commercial gestational surrogacy “production” has occurred in the 21st century is, as it happens, Bhopal, India, an area synonymous with a giant gas leak. As environmentalists have long attempted to make known, the disaster was inflicted on the Bhopali population by the Union Carbide corporation (a subsidiary of Dow Chemical) in 1984. Even forty years later, the poisonous methyl isocyanate from the gas leak continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in Bhopal. In fact, as feminist neuroscientist Deboleena Roy has shown, the MIC compound has made its way back to the Global North via the bodies of “surro-babies” commissioned by, for example, European and American parents. So, what can this circuit of historic molecular violence, whereby toxicity is returned to its place of origin through the labors of gestating Indians, tell us about the task of decolonization? When that which goes around ends up coming around, how do we respond to the accidental kinship forged?


The event is part of the accompanying programme for the Nature Red in Tooth and Claw exhibition, curated by Hana Janečková.