Alia Parker | Multispecies Commensality: The Experimental Edge of Biodesign

This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

Eating, digesting and metabolising, although performed in often manifestly different ways, is something shared by more-than-humans and humans alike. When we eat, we eat with others. What or who we eat, and eat with, speaks to our ethical tendencies, our cultural contexts and can demonstrate how we may care for ourselves and others through the labours of preparing and sharing a meal. Taking the protein-rich chickpea as a starting point, this talk explores the aesthetic and culinary possibilities of chickpeas for fungal and human palates alike. How might a politics of multispecies digestion be reconceived when we reach across the table and break bread with those often overlooked as non-charismatic passive others, or simply as matter to be consumed?

Critical and experimental biodesign practices can work to expand our conceptions of commensality beyond the human through an exploration of multispecies gustatory mutualisms where eating bodies begin to overlap and commune. In this talk, Alia will examine digesting and metabolising as a core process involved in designing with living systems. Tracing the work of Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Annemarie Mol, eating across species difference is revealed to be always-already shared. Creative practice enacted as meal sharing can work to enliven new ways of caring for the multispecies worlds of which we are a part.

Alia Parker is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher. Her creative practice and scholarship is concerned with the intersection of contemporary design and science investigating the ethical, relational and material possibilities that arise when working with more-than-human organisms in design contexts. Alia’s critical biodesign practice employs experimental methodologies in textiles, fashion, biology, installation and moving image, underpinned by posthuman ethics, philosophies of care and biosemiotics. She draws on design histories and speculative futures to generate affirmative ways of working in times of ecological precarity. Alia lectures in Design at the Australian National University and has exhibited and presented her work widely, most recently in TEXTURE at Canberra Contemporary Art Space (2023); she won first prize in the wearable category for the Northern Beaches Environmental Art and Design Prize at Manly Art Gallery and Museum (2022); Biomateriality at the Delmar Gallery, Sydney (2022); Bankstown Biennale: Symbiosis at Bankstown Art Centre (2020); and has shown her work at significant national design institutions and events. For over ten years, Alia worked as a designer, maker and researcher in the ethical fashion and textile industry in New York, Melbourne and Sydney.

Image: Alia Parker, How to Share a Multispecies Meal process image, 2022. Photo: Alia Parker.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.