Fly Affinities: Sensing Ecstasy in Decay through Interspecies Relations

This past spring, I cared for hundreds of flesh flies (sacrophaga bullata) in my apartment, and fed them my blood throughout their lives. I did so out of an interest in exploring the possibility of ecstatic decay—conceived as a vibrant material entanglement, post-death, that locates the transcendence of ecstasy in the body, rather than out of it (Bennett (2010), Braidotti (2013), Lykke (2021)). Through my fumbling attempts at care, and the metabolic exchange of my DNA (Engelhaupt 2016), we conjured a queer affiliation, an “improper affinity” (Chen 2012), between us. I came to intimately know their appearance, actions, sounds, smells, touch; including the ways they taste with their feet, sense movement with their compound eyes, ingest sugar with their proboscis. I also gained a “sense” of my bodily decay in their bellies - the ways this disrupted “all the boundaries between me and not-me” (Lykke 2021, 76). This experience suggests to me that decay is a site of radical transformation and, perhaps even more challengingly, that such self-transcendence is an abjectly gross process - excessive, strange, even repellent. Thus, as we approach a future of drastic and compounding ecological change, I advocate for leaning into kinship with “contamination.” Keywords: flies, ecstasy, decay, metabolism, contamination

Maria Simmons ∆ (Interdisciplinary Humanities, Concordia University, Canada)

Swamps, Bogs, and the Language of Decay

This presentation explores the entangled relationship between personal and ecological decay, focusing on the liminal landscapes of swamps and bogs as sites of both life and death. Drawing on first-hand observations of a transitional bog near Sudbury, this reflection weaves together the sensory experience of the swamp—its textures, smells, and histories—with intimate moments at a hospice bedside. Through poetic inquiry, I trace parallels between the anoxic, preservative qualities of peatlands and the complex processes of bodily decline, as observed in my grandmother’s final days. By considering bogs as portals to the underworld and repositories of cultural memory—where butter, bodies, and artifacts are preserved—I question what forms of care and ritual remain meaningful in a contemporary context. This presentation offers an embodied meditation on time, touch, and the invisible forces shaping both natural and human life, inviting us to reconsider our relationship with “waste” and transformation.
Keywords: Swamp Ecology, Ritual and Memory, Human and Non-Human Senses, Environmental Storytelling, Decay and Preservation

Abou Farman ∆ (The New School for Social Research, New York, USA)

No Silence in the Afterlife

A short reading, with visuals, from my new book of experimental writing, No Silence in the Afterlife (X Artsists 2025), moving between appearance, disappearance and reappearance