Learning to be Affected in Contemporary Art

Abstract

The Canadian artist Diane Borsato has explored a number of different projects with bees and beekeepers, mushrooms and mychologists, and with plants. Much of Borsato’s practice is concerned with ‘learning’ through affective, bodily, and intimate gestures. She often works with specific groups of people – mycologists, astronomers, physicists, tea sommeliers, ikebana practitioners and beekeepers – in order to think about the mobility of thought, about ethical-political encounters, and the affective dimensions to embodied knowing.