Maria Dębińska

Maria Dębińska received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Warsaw in 2015. Her thesis on transgender politics in Poland was published in 2020 in Polish under the title Transplciowosc w Polsce. Wytwarzanie kategorii (Transgender in Poland. Production of a Category). She is interested in how scientific knowledge enters non-academic social fields and how it is used and transformed when adapted by new social groups.

She has written on the sociological ambitions of Polish sexology before 1989, climate activism in Poland as an apparatus that allows for perceiving and conceptualizing climate change, and the slime mould as a site for defining and conceptualizing the social. Since 2019 she has held an Assistant Professor position at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where from 2020–22 she was principal investigator of the research grant Slime as Method: Ethnography of Scientific Practice funded by the National Science Centre in Poland.

This project focuses on the nexus of human, microbial and inorganic temporalities and the processes of mediation between their respective timescales, taking as a case the studies on plastic biodegradation by bacteria and fungi. Visual technologies for mediating between human and non- human timescales, such as time-lapse photography, have played a crucial role in biological research since the development of photography itself. However, the time-lapse in the title refers not just to this particular photographic technique but to the notion of a lapse in time that renders itself perceptible.

The multiple crises of global warming, 6th great extinction and environmental pollution with human-made materials whose lives are orders of magnitude longer than human, such as plastic, atmospheric carbon dioxide or nuclear waste, force us to confront non-human temporalities and develop techniques of making them perceptible and intelligible by humans. Those phenomena are difficult to visualise in a non-abstract way due to their different temporal and spatial scales, therefore in this project I investigate metabolism as a time-measuring device and as a process of mediation between different timescales, using the notion of a time-lapse as a metaphor for the process of reducing the observed phenomenon to a human scale.

Physarum polycephalum is a plasmodial slime mould, an organism that looks like a fungus but behaves like an animal, as it is able to move and feeds on bacteria, fungi spores, and rotting matter. Its unusual properties have turned it into a very popular laboratory organism, employed in a variety of experiments investigating the origins of intelligence and consciousness, as well as the creation and optimization of networks.

The aim of this project is to examine chosen experiments with Physarum polycephalum in order to describe the ways in which it is used as a model of and for human behaviours and communication systems. A close examination of the slime mould apparatus (a concept borrowed from Karen Barad), especially of experimental lab procedures and the underlying theoretical premises of Physarum experiments, will provide a detailed rendering of what Martin Holbraad has called ‘the shape of conceptual relations’ within it. Of particular interest is how concepts of the world and of the human coalesce through the slimy and transform within the apparatus.