Mattertext Meets Cripistemology: Marco Donnarumma’s Work as Crip Aesthetics
Ethics and Society, vol.20, no.2, 2026 (SCI-Expanded, Scopus)
- Publication Type: Article / Article
- Volume: 20 Issue: 2
- Publication Date: 2026
- Doi Number: 10.1007/s11569-026-00508-0
- Journal Name: Ethics and Society
- Journal Indexes: Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED), Scopus
- Keywords: Crip aesthetics, Marco Donnarumma, Mattertext, Mattertextuality, New materialisms, Posthuman theory
- TED University Affiliated: Yes
Abstract
This article employs mattertext, a posthuman theoretical protocol devised for literary and artistic analyses, to scrutinize Marco Donnarumma’s biophysical performances as examples of crip aesthetics. Focusing on such works by Donnarumma as Ominous, Eingeweide, Corpus Nil, Hypo Chrysos, and I Am Your Body, the study argues that these works enact a crip mattertextual aesthetics in which noise, error, and failure operate as epistemic and ethical forces. Drawing from new materialist and poststructuralist thought, mattertext theorizes every act of inscription, ranging across sonic, bodily, and algorithmic, as an intra-active process where matter and meaning co-constitute one another. Through this framework, Donnarumma’s collaborative and AI-informed performances are read as critical reorientations toward vulnerability, interdependence, and collective access. Driven by such reoriented aesthetics, the article proposes noise-as-knowledge as the core of a crip mattertextual ethics: a redefinition of art, science, and technology as co-writing ecologies that value repair over perfection and reciprocity over control. Donnarumma’s practice thus exemplifies how posthumanist inquiry can amplify disabled embodiment as a creative and relational mode of world-making.