In her work, Margo Trushina explores the intersection of bioart and new feminist materialist ethics.

Her living sculptures and environments reflect upon recent discoveries in neuroscience, biotechnology and ecology through the lens of personal experience. In resonance with posthumanist turn in critical and political theory, the artist rediscovers more- than-human agencies within her own body undergoing physiological transformations. Interested in immediate and often obscured interactions between human and nonhuman actors, she redefines her notion of the self through the relationship with radical others at the intimate level, where the boundaries between her flesh and that of the world are porous, opened to new mutualistic alliances.

In tune with speculative ethics of care, Trushina pursues direct interspecies relationships as her way to address current environmental challenges — sea-level rise, species extinction, outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, pathologic gene mutations. The artist offers a subjective material vision of these problems by tying together substances of different nature — from steel and neon to corals and breast milk. Her fictional environments and sculptures reflect habitats and bodies affected by climate change yet still breathing, therefore calling for an ethical response.

Engaging with the diversity of agents entangled and intertwined with each other and their surroundings, she makes visible a variety of transcorporeal imprints in the bodies of others — humans and other animals, plants, water, light, soil, stones and fossils. To this purpose, she creates situations of intensive proximity to the other, allowing viewers to experience the transformative potential of actual and imagined touch (haptic visuality). In the artist’s view, such interactions actualise almost neglected communication trajectories and promise to inspire new forms of perception, similar to what Laura U. Marks calls empathic nonunderstanding.