Aliens in Green with Bureau d’études, Ewen Chardronnet and Špela Petrič

In the continuity of their public action design approaches carried out in different territories, Bureau d’études will present an approach that was discussed (and not carried out) within the framework of Aliens in Green with the city of Évry Courcouronnes in the Paris suburbs. If the Aliens in Green action has so far taken the form of action and popular science devices restricted in size, the hypothesis was to operate a change of scale, by putting into play the way in which endocrine disruptors affect the stakeholders of the city. An implementation was envisaged integrating a multiplicity of points of view and levels of action at the city level, according to a collective approach calling for the constitution of a consortium with the stakeholders concerned.

Aliens in Green is a mobile investigation laboratory & tactical theater group developing inquiries into the alien agents of anthropocenic xenopower. The lab implements intermedia processes that connects open-science, DIY practices, speculative narration, serious games, cultural intelligence and science-fiction, reaching out and opening a critical public space.

Exposure to synthetic chemicals interferes with human and nonhuman hormonal systems. Despite all the warnings about the toxic impacts of these endocrine disruptors, the lobbying of the petro-chemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries continue to influence regulatory institutions. These actors can be viewed as xeno-powers that both regulate and pollute our bodies and environment. At the same time, terms like “abnormal” or “disruptor” are at the center of most environmental and critical discourses, focusing the main arguments on sex-panic, gender ambiguity, and threats to reproductive futurism. These arguments reinforce a politics of purity that reflects our prescribed eco-hetero-normative value system. What is “normal” and “natural”? Do queers and our alien kin have no future in our increasingly toxic landscape? The Aliens in Green want to generate “a crisis of the body” that leads to non-prescriptive subjectivities, offering a kind of alien resilience called xeno-solidarity.

espacevirtuel.jeudepaume.org/aliens-in-green-3134/

Emilia Sanabria (CNRS)

This intervention asks how space can be held for healing within the diseased landscapes of colonialism. What does it mean to heal individuals when the territories in which they dwell – and from which they nourish themselves – are violently extracted, saturated in toxicity and unhospitable to regenerative forms of sociality? Drawing on ethnographic work on ayahuasca ritual practices the paper explores and expands the idiom of “holding space” for ceremonial healing work in relation to the territorial dimensions of colonial and racial violence. Emila Sanabria attends to lines of flight between “setting” and “settler” colonial projects by attending to the ways the assemblage of community-territory-plants is held, and ask how maintaining good relations, beyond the human, is imagined and realized.

cermes3.cnrs.fr/fr/membres/699-sanabria-emilia

Januš Aleš Luznar

ICTUSCORDIS is a series of audiovisual performances with the human heart as the main subject. The heart in the series goes far beyond the metaphor field of performing with a heart. It is an actual real time, living, physical, musical and visual instrument. The series is based on an audiovisual image that comes from a heartbeat and dynamically depicts the intimate relationship between the audience and the collective heartbeat. In the series artist explores the application of the Biofeedback method, by applying feedback loops between physical and mental body states. With the performances, artist invites the audience into a sacred space of artistic and spiritual intimacy and invites visitors to indulge in audiovisual image of the heart. Performances are usually followed by a short presentation and Q&A

ictuscordis.org

facebook.com/ictuscordisorg

soundcloud.com/ictuscordisorg

youtube.com/channel/UCq91Sj16jX19gQ0XWRFCKIA/

youtube.com/watch?v=LbAww1LU7VI&t=246s

instagram.com/ictuscordisperformance

Maya Minder

Green Open Food Evolution is a speculative narration into possible dietary program based on a algae rich nutrition, to rewrite the human holobiome and finally become Homo Photosyntheticus. A speculative fabulation maybe an actual possibility, open to a poetic approach in giving a proposal for future scenarios.

A scientific paper has recently discovered how the intestinal microflora of the Japanese had equipped themselves to digest Nori seaweeds: a gene transfer occurred between an ancestral marine bacterium and an intestinal bacterium specific to the Japanese. Once ingested by Japanese people, marine bacteria associated with algae were able to come into contact with intestinal bacteria and transfer their “ustensils” to them. This unique transfer event is relatively recent in the evolution of intestinal bacteria, but is undoubtedly quite ancient from a human point of view (a few hundred or thousands of years). Would our own intestinal bacteria be able to acquire the same utensils today as the intestinal bacteria of the Japanese if we regularly ate raw seaweed-based foods?

This question that comes to mind spontaneously remains open. On the other hand, it is very likely that such gene transfers between intestinal bacteria and environmental bacteria took place throughout the evolution of vertebrates, explaining the prevalence of polysaccharide degrading enzymes from terrestrial plants in the microflora of herbivores and omnivores. This discovery of the “sushi factor” is in any case only the beginning of a wider field of investigation of the evolution of human microflora, the human holobionte and its possible future.

What will it mean in future if us omnivores will be witnessed with scarcity in food and environment. What could happen to our Homo Photosyntheticus, a sort of ultimate vegetarian who no longer eats but lives on internally produced food from his algae symbiosis? Our Homo Photosyntheticus descendants might, with time, tend to lose their mouths, becoming translucent, slothish, and sedentary.

The workshop will conduct a lecture performance, a speculative writing workshop and a cooking class with many tastings and fabulations on how to become Homo Photosyntheticus. In addition there will be a kinaesthetic workshop on enhencing body and mind perception accompagnied by Annabel Guérédrat, a certified BMC practitioner, and Adam Zaretsky.

Green Open Food Evolution is supported by ProHelvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture and the ArtExplora Foundation.

citedesartsparis.net/en/maya-minder

Maya Minder, Ewen Chardronnet

Maya Minder currently leads the research project Green Open Food Evolution – dietetics and endosymbiotic co-evolution to become Homo Photosyntheticus during her residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts. The installation presents here a serie of interviews conducted for the Green Open Food Evolution in collaboration with the film maker Sandra Bühler and the interdisciplinary artistic research project Roscosmoe – The worm that wanted to go into space initiated by Ewen Chardronnet and the marine biologists Xavier Bailly and Gaëlle Correc (researchers at the Roscoff Biological Station, Finistère – CNRS Sorbonne Universités).*

Green Open Food Evolution / Roscosmoe is supported by ProHelvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture and the ArtExplora Foundation.

Nathalie Harb, Benoît Piéron

For Open Source Body, Nathalie Harb and Benoît Piéron invite participants to join them in a soapy textile decor. They will inhabit this space with their words around the limits of the Home, the body, intimacy in the hospital and other existential environments. The curtain, second skin, soft wall, is a border surface, the interstitial membrane where interiors and exteriors meet.

citedesartsparis.net/en/nathalie-harb
citedesartsparis.net/en/benoit-pieron

Adriana Knouf (Tranxxeno Lab, Waag)

We live in times that are in-transition, from the pharmaceutical transitioning that some of us experience on a daily basis, to the micro and macro changes that occur as we move from birth to death, to the need to transition to more humble ways of relating to other entities on this earth. This occurs within extreme environments (political, social, environmental) that become ever more challenging to survive in–let alone thrive in.

This early research takes as a starting point that within “the transitioning times” we need tools–protocols, directions, concepts, hyperstitions–that can help us on our journeys. Beginning from my own experiences as someone in-transition within the pharmacopornographic regime, I am exploring past manifestations of in-between oracles, encountering the ghosts within legacies of queer and trans care, generating hyperstitions for the moments that we will have experienced, and developing new protocols for being-with our alien and alienated entities near us. This work is meant to push back against the rising tide of promethian transhumanism that takes the body–and the earth–as something to be overcome through the application of profit-driving technoscience.

art4med.eu/project/xenological-preterrelations/

Emilia Tikka (Bioart Society)

The modernist episteme of extraction, taking nature as raw material for human ends, threatens all life forms including humans themselves. This results today as rising health issues, extreme weather conditions and toxic environments. In the arctic areas, the global warming advances even two times faster reinforcing extinction of species, increase of rain and floods and decreasing of snow. Therefore, radical re-imagining of human-nature-technology relations in the arctic are urgently required.

This project takes critical storytelling, mixing science facts with science fiction – as an approach to rethink concepts beyond green utopias or apocalyptic dystopias, reimagining new forms of living and co-existing in technoscientific environments. As forms of survival on the damaged planet, symbiotic modes of biotechnological adaption are explored following Donna Haraway`s question on “how genetic engineering might be used to bind people into new symbiotic partnerships? (1) In this frame the project aims to speculate on human genetic alterations with CRISPR as Xeno-Optimizations for Arctic Survival in the era of climate crisis. Speculative scenarios, drawing from existing realities and stories of the past, are situated in the geographic area of the Finnish Arctic. Non-occidental cosmologies will form a frame for technoscientific speculations as collaborative engagements.

The project is a continuity of Emilia Tikka`s ongoing artistic design research on biomedical use of the genome-editing technology CRISPR, critically engaging with questions of human optimization and health. Editing human germline introduces inheritable changes, which are passed on to the following generations and therefore might radically alter the human evolution. The promise of CRISPR includes biomedical applications to cure diseases, but next to that, market driven interests are arising to advocate enhancement of human species towards optimized mental and physical capabilities and longer lifespans. This project aims to critically counter these transhumanist visions, reinforced by anthropocentric solipsism and human mastery over nature. The project draws from feminist posthumanities, in which human is not seen as separate but rather embodied and embedded in ‘nature’. In the frame of ART4MED residency, the project underlines how issues of human biomedical health are increasingly connected to the questions of environmental crisis. In order to imagine biomedical applications of genome-editing beyond genetic determinism and human exceptionalism, the project refers to the concept of holobiont, indicating the human condition as deeply entangled with more-than-human worlds.

(1) Eben Kirksey, The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans, First edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2020)

art4med.eu/project/xeno-optimizations-for-arctic-survival/

Future Baby Production with Shu Lea Cheang and Vivien Roussel

UNBORN0X9 is an art installation and a hacking performance questioning the development of foetuses in artificial wombs outside of the body (ectogenesis) and the cyborg future of parenting. It explores the role of obstetric science in the increasingly technological experience of human reproduction, speculating on new types of bonding that may emerge with artificial wombs. Here, pregnancy is integrated into a high-tech vision of the body as a biological component of a cybernetic communication system.

In collaboration with EchOpen living lab, who is developing an open-source ultrasound echo-stethoscope for smartphone, UNBORN0X9 forks the prototype of its professional tool and hacks the inaudible ultrasonic waves in a sonic conversion, opening up multi-interface communication with the unborn. As collective FUTURE BABY PRODUCTION, we have engaged in simulating an ultrasonic readable phantom baby for research and exhibition purpose. For the last two years, biomaterials such as agar agar, gelatin, cellulose, etc. in its various composition and combination ratio as well as chemical silicon application are tested. Our main objective is to obtain a biomaterial capable of withstanding both the constraints specific to the field of sculpture (moulding, demoulding, flexibility, rigidity, holding…), as well as the technical constraints (echogenic image, qualities of the materials, cost, ease of implementation, reproducibility…). In the open and collaborative production process, the baby formulation is tested with ultrasound probe operated  by a robot arm making constant data scan. The scanned data acquired are rendered  in sonic and visual manifestation and further expanded for collective sonic performance.

UNBORN0X9 is an ART4MED project supported by Makery medialab and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

art4med.eu/project/unborn0x9/

unborn0x9.labomedia.org

youtube.com/watch?v=Pyvx4yC3lcs

Helena Nikonole, Lucy Ojomoko (Kersnikova)

For humans, olfaction has significantly lost its bio-semiotic role. In our project we are going to amplify and expand the vocabulary of this signal system by developing DIY-approaches for modifying human skin microbiome in order to produce smells which can be easily detected to self-diagnose or prevent diseases.
The ability to smell and to identify smells can be seen in a context of bio-semiotics. In this project artists are releasing the potential of this signal system by using noninvasive technology of human skin microbiome gene modifications in order to create bacteria producing detectable odors as a response to particular triggers\conditions such as fever, infectious process or disease. In future, for instance, we will make bacteria which start to smell as a jasmine when a person has cancer or smell as a rose when a person has some infection. Therefore, the smell of human microbiome becomes an easy system of diagnostics.

The ART4MED project by Helena Nikonole and Lucy Ojomoko is supported by the Kersnikova Institute (Ljulbjana, Slovenia) and is co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme.

art4med.eu/project/quorum-sensing-skin-flora-signal-system/

Jens Hauser (Copenhagen Medical Museion)

The pervasive trope of ‘greening everything’ not only impacts on public discourse but affects all disciplines of knowledge production alike – why should art, medicine and the techno-sciences be an exception? Restful spinach green became the colour of medicine in hospital clothing and instruments, artists play on the chemical similitude of haemoglobin red and chlorophyll green, highlighting its photosynthetic qualities, or engage in chlorophyll transfusions and other kinds of plantamorphisations to increasingly address nonhuman agencies or adopt plants’ metabolic rhythms.  Here, ‘green’ is being employed to reconcile humans with otherness as such, and to symbolically hyper-compensate for what we have lost. In its inherent ambiguity – between alleged naturalness and artificiality, remedy and toxicity – ‘green’ is paradoxically the most anthropocentric of all colours, and plays a central role in human evolution and self-understanding.

This introductory talk provides the framework for a dialogue with Myra N. Chávez, biologist at the University if Bern.

Luiza Prado (LABAE)

The Art of Repair is a collective research project conducted by Edna Bonhomme and Luiza Prado on reproductive technologies, trauma and repair. The project will look into questions of disability- and reproductive justice, and explore matters of racialized and gendered inequities within health care systems. From the vantage of autobiographical archives, the project will chart reproductive medical geographies, and the history of medical experimentation and racism with the Black body. Foregrounding practices of speculation, health activism and communal care, Art of Repair will trouble questions of making kin through medical apparatuses and scientific regimes, and propose methodologies of radical care and repair.

Luiza Prado & Edna Bonhomme ART4MED project is curated by The Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology of Copenhagen and sees collaborations with The Center for Arts and Mental Health (CPH) and ARIEL – Feminisms in the Aesthetics (CPH) and co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union.

art4med.eu/project/the-art-of-repair/

Myra Chávez (Bern Institute of Anatomy)

Higher animal tissues are incapable of maintaining normal metabolic activity, and hence survive, without sustained and sufficient oxygen supply. This evolutional suboptimal design has forced us heterotrophs to become intrinsically dependent of a functional cardiovascular system. However, if one takes as a premise that the source of all oxygen is produced through photosynthetic organisms, several revolutionary ideas may rise to find new solutions for pathologies related to tissue hypoxia; which is precisely what has been happening over the past 20 years. These so-called photosynthetic approaches have proposed to employ photosynthetic microorganisms to circumvent the need of blood perfusion to sustain tissue survival in applications that include the development of artificial human tissues and the sustainment of oxygen-deprived organs.

In particular, over the past 8 years, our group has aimed at establishing a new technology which proposes the use of photosynthetic microorganisms such as microalgae and cyanobacteria to overcome clinical problems that derive from a lack of oxygen in our tissues. Furthermore, we have developed an alternative system of recombinant protein production-delivery to locally supply bioactive molecules into affected tissues. This concept named “photosynthetic gene therapy” exploits the biotechnological potential of unicellular photosynthetic microorganisms to produce and secrete functional recombinant proteins such as cytokines, growth factors, and other promising bioactive molecules directly into affected tissues.

Interestingly, the principles and premises behind the photosynthetic technologies proposed so far, are supported by examples in nature, where heterotrophic organisms have learned to profit from a symbiotic relationship with a photosynthetic protist. It is therefore imaginable that biomedical research could enable some degree of independence from external oxygen supply by allowing our tissues to acquire photosynthetic capacities.

Myra Chávez is supported by ProHelvetia, Fondation suisse pour la culture.

symbiox.org/

Mariana Rios Sandoval (CNRS)

How do we deal with pollutants that are supposed to be everywhere all the time, but that we can’t see? In this short session, Sandoval will talk about the many invisibilities that feed the popular notion that EDCs are an “invisible threat”, as well as ways to make these molecules, and many others, visible. In particular, she will focus on how social sciences research is collaborating with partners beyond the academic field to shed light on this everyday toxicity.

cermes3.cnrs.fr/fr/post-doctorants/782-rios-sandoval-mariana

Annabel Guérédrat

My name is bruja and I make love with sargassum. In this all-encompassing globalized world that ferociously swallows up the slightest individual initiative, sensitive on the surface of my own skin, among the sargassum, I mobilize Afro-diasporic bruja witch power. For a short moment, in a performative and ritual act, I nestle in the sargassum; I create a sort of nest and bury myself inside it. I engulf myself in some of the most toxic seaweed that invades the West Indian coast. I intoxicate myself with heavy metals, inorganic arsenic. I contaminate myself in order to make this algae mine, invaginate it, colonize it in turn and create the act of life. Coming out of it, I am reborn.

By ensargassing myself a bit more each day, I extract myself from a form of globalized witch politics to make my witch, a living bruja in the Caribbean, anchored on this land of Martinique, a heroine of the current era who has survived despite the years, centuries of colonization, contamination, occupation.

artincidence.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Anabelle_geredrat-portfolio.pdf

Aniara Rodado

We are witnessing an assassination of life in all its forms. Bodies, communities and territories are being attacked. Memory is being erased in order to accommodate knowledge while inventing filiations to deactivate it, appropriating what is “useful” without ever referring to the subordinate subjects that incarnated it. The Against Witch-washing project reactivates technologies that are specific to trans-species interactions in marginalized and “feminized” communities. The witch-hunt is still going on.

Can we understand the relationships between human communities and plants—including those we call “drugs” or “psychotropics”—through the ways in which we inhabit our own bodies and ecosystems, if we persist in separating human life from non-human life? Is it possible to intimately understand these interactions if we abstract the notion of pleasure?

aniara-rodado.net

Quimera Rosa

This performance, based on the ongoing bio-medical and community health research project “My disease is an artistic creation”, combines live bio-hacking practices and an audio-visual journey through the different steps leading to the elaboration of an open source protocol. A becoming laboratory mouse in the company of computer mouses.

gridspinoza.net/en/projects/transplant-my-disease-artistic-creation

This performance, created on the occasion of Open Source Body, is part of the Trans*Plant project

quimerarosa.net/transplant/

Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez (Cité Internationale des Arts)

Born in the Greater Paris region during the COVID 19 lockdown, our initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care started bringing together – through relations of friendship and of working experiences alike – curatorial, artistic, and health research and practices that enact solidarity and care, especially in situations when institutions disengage, fail or neglect. Today, in the art context, new forms solidarity and mutuality beyond individuality have to be connected to new forms of care. Increasingly, care is explicitly tied to solidarity and framed as intersection of social, anti-racist and ecological movements which articulate their positions as protectors rather than protesters, emphasising the importance of caring for and being good stewards of societies as ecosystems.