Painting Vital Entanglements: Science Education as Science Poethics

In this paper, I present a thought experiment focused on the work of Brazilian indigenous artist Jaider Esbell and science visualization researchers and visual artists Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill. I make this connection not because they are both beautiful sources of inspiration for science education, but because the images carry mysteriously entangled worlds, as is usually the case with paintings. Because these images resonate with each other, I suggest a reading of science education as science poethics. This study describes the molecular and cosmological entanglements painted by the artists as opening up the possibility of finding aesthetic alternatives to twenty-five centuries of European metaphysics based on a monovalent ontology and a bivalent logic. My proposal carries out a poetic turn in science education from the resonances between vital entanglements and through intersecting images that, upon contact, mutually transform each other, which can be important from a multiverse point of view. In our post-pandemic era, this way of thinking allows for an understanding of science education that is more intriguing than that derived from the radical division between representation and reality and between nature and culture.