Totipotency, nanoart and formation: creation of/with the living in its materialities

Abstract

This speculative essay proposes a rearticulation of the biological concept of plant totipotency from the field of nanoart, seeking to understand how the creation of the living can be conceived in its materialities. In a dialogue inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, in understanding creation as the production of difference, with Haraway’s sympoiesis, which highlights emergence as relational, and with Tim Ingold, in considering formation as correspondence, the problematization focuses on nanoart practices that operate through intervention or technical visualization of matter on an infinitesimal scale. It argues that, in these contexts, creation is not reduced to representation, but involves processes of emergence in which form, matter, and technique co-determine each other. Here, totipotency is understood as a relational logic of actualization of virtualities, which becomes perceptible in nanoart by highlighting that the minimum contains potencies of differentiation of the living. Finally, the text points to developments of this perspective for thinking about formation as an open, situated, and relational process, in which creating and learning are mutually implicated. Thus, we explore works of nanoart, in which the artistic gesture asserts itself as a practice of co-creation and collaborative learning, intertwining the biological, the philosophical, and the technological. In this movement, totipotency is woven as the material of (trans)formation – an insurgent power that makes life and education a single act of creation, from which futures, coexistences, and possible worlds germinate.