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< > (Click on arrows or image above to navigate.) Artist: Natalija Subotincic Title: Incarnate Tendencies An architecture of culinary refuse Date: 2004 Media: mixed media -- dining table: steel frame, concrete and bone surface, Georgian wire glass Notes: For seven years she saves the bones of every animal she eats. Every restaurant meal, every barbecue at a friend's house, every time she cooks meat at home, the bones are retrieved -rescued from their fate as refuse. Away from home she wraps them in a napkin or doggy bag. At home she sets them aside. After dinner she washes the dishes, then she washes the bones with a toothbrush - meticulously. The bones are set to dry in the dish rack alongside the dishes. Clean and dry. Later, when she puts the dishes back in the cupboards, she will prepare the bones for storage like a taxidermist,and file them by type, like a nineteenth-century naturalist. This becomes a regular part of her domestic chores. An astounding transformation occurs through this labour. By these painstaking yet simple acts of devotion, she transforms what would have been garbage, into a growing collection of small miracles. A radical re- categorization. These bones,no less beautiful than those displayed in a museum of natural history,have been redeemed.Instead of being scraped off the plate as garbage,they have been made into precisely what they are. Like museum specimens,they exude through their form both the miracle of life and the presence of mortality. Biographical: Natalija Subotincic is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Manitoba. She is currently collaborating with the founders of the Museum of Jurassic Technology on the design of an extension to the museum's facilities in Los Angeles, California. Her research on critical design studio pedagogy has been published nationally and internationally. Her creative research has involved the integration of architecture and photography in the following: "Interpretation of Rooms" an ongoing spatial analysis of the relationships between Sigmund Freud's theories, collection, and the rooms he and his patients occupied, to be exhibited at "Re Building the World" at The Edmonton Art Gallery (February 2005); "Incarnate Tendencies - An Architecture of Culinary Refuse," a social and architectural re-evaluation of the 'threshold' between food preparation and food consumption published in Eating Architecture by MIT Press (2004); "Anaesthetic Induction," an analysis of Marcel Duchamp's Le Grand Verre and Étant Donné, published in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture, McGill/Queen's Press (1994); An examination of the integration of technology, architecture and the body through both text and image, resulting in a filmic 98Õ photo-collage spanning the first fifteen chapters of Polyphilo or the Dark Forest Revisited, in collaboration with Dr. A. Perez-Gomez published by M.I.T. Press (1992); "The Canadian Industrial Heritage Project" a Canada Council funded photo documentation of industrial buildings across Canada (1984).