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In Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction novel The More Than Human (1953), a group of humans with unusual disabilities and powers enter into a symbiotic relationship to create a self-sustaining living organism, composed of several individuals.

This concept of “More-Than-Human” is taken up today in environmental philosophy to counter the nature-culture dualism and the hegemonic exceptionalism of the human.

If the exhibition “More Than Living” marks the need to feel more alive than ever in a post COVID-19 society, it also invites us to take a renewed look, “More Than Human”, at our existences in the terrestrial environment.

Based on multiple atmospheric, evolutionary, affective and bodily studies, the artists lead us to rethink our sensitive relationship to our environment, as well as the gestures and narratives of our evolutionary becoming. Inspired by this renewal of cultural geography in the time of global warming and mass extinctions, More Than Living makes perceptible the vulnerabilities shared between species.

Today we observe a strengthening of technological aids to medical practice, removing more and more the direct contact between the doctor and his patient. Nearly 40 years ago, philosopher and primatologist Donna Haraway introduced a feminist critique of the “cyborg body. Her vision continues to accompany artists when addressing the robotization and technologization of reproduction, prosthetics or body augmentation, and the relationship between a certain militaristic vision of the body developed in science fiction and the medical science in the making.

Finally, the exhibition examines how certain social groups or individuals can be coerced, stigmatised or disenfranchised in a normative society.

Ewen Chardronnet & Nataša Petresin-Bachelez

Maya Minder

Green Open Food Evolution

Installation and performance – 2022

Cyanobacteria obtain energy using photosynthesis and, in so doing, release oxygen into the atmosphere. As a result, they are responsible for what is called the Great Oxygenation Event, which took place some 2.4 billion years ago and caused the first mass extinction on Earth. As we observe the acceleration of the Holocene extinction that is the direct result of human activity, we have to ask ourselves how life on Earth will continue to evolve.

We humans live in symbiosis with our gut bacteria. With the help of these non-human allies, we communicate with our environment through food and ingestion. In Japan for example, horizontal gene transfer has occurred in the microbiome due to the ancient tradition of eating seaweed. What would we become if we only ate seaweed and tried to coevolve with these foreign species from the kingdom of Protista?

Bearing in mind this deep time perspective and the more-than-human multitudes that could take part in a speculative story as yet unwritten, would it be possible to become entirely autotrophic and evolve into Homo Photosyntheticus? Green Open Food Evolution embarks on this journey and incorporates design, performance, biohacking and cooking into an installation and a film that aim to be both open and procedural.

In its role as a “mediakitchen lab”, Green Open Food Evolution questions how biohacking can take into consideration the approach to evolutionary biology propounded by Lynn Margulis, molecular transformation during the cooking process and a cross-disciplinary approach using new media, performance and life itself to activate an architectural structure. “Cooking transforms us” is the starting point for Minder’s practice and her holistic approach for transformation and progression, informed by the many interconnections between food and the act of eating, an approach that mutually fosters care and creates new forms of symbolism, alchemy and storytelling.

ARTISTE: Maya MINDER

CO-DESIGNER OF THE WORK: Ewen CHARDRONNET / Maya MINDER / Gabriel VIOLLEAU – Bientôt Architectes Urbanistes / Victor YVIN & Pacôme GERARD Designers Artisans CONSTRUCTION: Victor YVIN & Pacôme GERARD Designers Artisans ACTIVATION: Ewen CHARDRONNET / Maya MINDER PRODUCTION: Ewen CHARDRONNET & Maya MINDER with ANTRE PEAUX & ART2M supported by PRO HELVETIA / REGION CENTRE-VAL-DE-LOIRE / CREATIVE EUROPE

This project is supported by the project More-Than-Planet (2022-2025) co-funded by the Creative Europ Program of the European Union.

Maya Minder (CH)

Maya Minder works in the field of Eatart. Culinary delights are at her table of undigested narration, projecting relational topographies between cultural hybridisation and human coevolution. As a specialist in the lacto-frementation, she works with bacteria, fungi and algae while applying this knowledge into her kitchen, film making, craft and design. Re-imaginating ancestral futures brought alive by embodied knowledge by welcoming co-habitation with non-human agency and entanglement of cross-cultural histories. She uses wild fermentation as a metaphore for human agitation processing raw nature into cooked culture. Following feminist histories, she uses art science and queer theories to combine them with her practice as biohacker.
Maya Minder was in residency at the Cité internationale des arts through the 2021 edition of the “Art Explora x Cité internationale des arts” program.

www.mayaminder.ch
www.hackteria.org

Albert García-Alzórriz

The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology

Video installation – 21′ – 2022

“Health is life in the silence of the organs”, wrote French surgeon René Leriche in an entry in the Encyclopédie Française in 1936. The close symbiosis between aesthetics and medicine dates back to classical antiquity, when pharmakon (drug) referred to the materiality of chroma (colour). This relationship peaked in the 19th century with the arrival of medical imaging.

As Jean-Luc Godard noted in Histoire(s) du cinéma, the dawn of cinema coincides with the origins of radiology; indeed, the sale of X-ray film brought a company like Kodak more success than its photographic film. Furthermore, the colours used for special effects backdrops and hospital uniforms and decorative schemes emerged from a single logic that saw green and blue became standard in both cases, two colours that are also the complementary colours to those present in blood and other human tissues.

Paradoxically throughout history, the closer we have got to the metaphorical silence of the organs, the more necessary their aesthetic synthesis through increasingly complex and precise sounds and images, has become. The current paradigm of healthcare dynamics, where bodies and their representations are sometimes indistinguishable, is the starting point of this installation.

The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology is an audio-visual study on the relationship between the human body and the latest hospital medical technology. It focuses on the liminal situations where the real and the represented merge. With a hypnotic pace throughout, it documents an operation assisted by the da Vinci robot and a training session using an automated replica of the human body.

Production credits:

The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology is the result of the ‘Baden-Württemberg-Catalonia Exchange Grant’ at the WKV, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, Hangar and Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, and the ‘Internationalisation grant’ at Cité internationale des arts, in collaboration with Fundació Güell and La Escocesa.

It has received the support of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art, the Government of Catalonia’s Department of Culture and the Fundació Güell, with additional collaboration from Escafior Films, Klinikum Stuttgart and Zeiss Cinematography.

Albert García-Alzórriz (ES)

Albert García-Alzórriz has recently exhibited at international events and festivals, including the 58th Biennale di Venezia (2019), FID Marseille (2020), FID Buenos Aires (2020), Documenta Madrid (2020), as well as at public institutions, such as the IVAM in Valencia (2018), the Hong-Gah museum in Taipei (2020), the Louvre museum in Paris (2021), the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2021) and El Águila exhibition hall in Madrid (2021).

Over the last year, he has been a resident artist at several national and international institutions, such as Hangar in Barcelona (Spain), Casa Planas in Mallorca (Spain) and the Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (Germany).

Albert García-Alzórriz was in residency at the Cité internationale des arts through the 2021 edition of the “La Escocesa x Cité internationale des arts” program.

www.garcia-alzorriz.com

l4bouche – Estelle Benazet H. & Cindy Coutant

Jupiter Space

Installation and performance – 2021

Jupiter Space is an installation based on the French translation (to be published in October 2022) of the article “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism” by Zoë Sofia, originally published in Diacritics magazine in 1984.

Zoë Sofia’s amusing, extra-terrestrial work raises the paradox of how a conservative state can defend a pro-life stance, while at the same time possessing weapons of mass destruction under the guise of “defending life”.

According to Zoë Sofia, the answer lies at the heart of our conception of technology and more precisely as it is represented in mainstream science fiction: the control of bodies and the negation of the Earth and future generations; and a culture that hides the question of extinction (although it is already on our doorstep) behind the fascinating mask of the high-fidelity of an absent reality that collapses the future into the present, preventing us from thinking about what has truly been engendered.

The installation augments Zoë Sofia’s conceptual matrix from the unpublished drawings in her Extinction Sux series and expands on her relentless demonstration through its theoretical, iconographic and political ramifications from 1350 to the present day. Hypertextual, sexual and poetic operations emerge illustrating the regime of signs that divides the world into either penetrable-cannibalised bodies, or penetrating-extractivist tools. In the installation, missiles, aliens, mother ships and excremental inventions revolve around sadistic children, providing the incriminating evidence that condemns this great technological narrative that assaults bodies.

Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser (FR/AT) & Cindy Coutant (FR)

Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser is an author and researcher. Her texts stage bodies that experience themselves. Desire, hunger and expenditure generate action and metabolize the exercise of power. Her writing work has been published in the form of books: Le régime parfait, 2022, Autre saison, 2021, Bêcher son visage; in magazines: La Déferlante, Sabir, A.O.C.; in exhibitions during public performances: Villa Belleville, Centre Pompidou; or in the form of radio plays, DUUU radio, Radio Marais. Her current thesis is entitled Écrire avec les Affamées.

Cindy Coutant is in residency as part of the Cité internationale des arts “2-12” programme.

Cindy Coutant is an artist, researcher and publisher. Her installations, films and augmented readings close to the SF genre probe into our conception of technology and its relation to affects. They address issues such as love in an age of lexical privatisation, the grammar of anxiety and alternative narratives for the creation of the world. Her creative thesis establishes a genealogy of the minority critique of technology that brings our relationship to the future up to date.

l4bouche (Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser & Cindy Coutant) translates, writes and exposes the brutal realities and examples of radical alterity engendered by late capitalism.

www.estellebenazeth.net
www.cindycoutant.net

Helena Nikonole & Lucy Ojomoko

Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System

Installation – 2022

Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System is a project that consists in carrying out human skin microbiome gene modifications to make it possible to detect diseases through smell. In addition, this project creates a system that unites three kingdoms – bacteria, plants and animals (such as humans) – in a symbiotic relationship. By creating genetically modified skin microbiome bacteria that produce a floral scent as a response to a trigger, such as a disease or fever, the project invites us to consider the skin microbiome as a terminal or an interface.

On a bio-semiotic level, this signal system can be revived and reimagined by programming and reprogramming existing biological relations and structures in the human body into an artificially created organ that is nevertheless natural, one which combines molecular-level processes and something tangible like a smell. In terms of medicine, this system can be considered as a method for diagnosis and self-diagnosis, as well as a way of perceiving and even preventing disease.

However, we can expand this understanding in terms of bio-semiotics and see it as a new sensory organ with specific ability to redefine the existing signal system (smells) and use a familiar (olfactory) sensation to encode and decode the information on a biochemical level.

Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System is supported by ART4MED, a cooperation co-funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. Helena Nikonole, artist – Lucy Ojomoko, artist & scientific researcher. Kersnikova Institute: Kristijan Tkalec, scientific researcher (BioTehna Lab); Jurij Krpan, curator (Kapelica Gallery); Simon Gmajner, producer (Vivarium Laboratory); Jure Sajovic, technician; Eva Debevc, scientific assistant, Jakob Grčman, technical assistant, Luka Jare, 3D modelling and print (RAMPA Lab) – Nika Peshekhonova, 3D design – Vera Vishnevaia, technical assistant – Zvonko Drobnič, glassware production. Mycosmo Infrastructural Centre: Mojca Matul, associate scientific researcher; Nina Gunde-Cimerman PhD, associate scientific researcher; Cene Gostinčar PhD, associate scientific researcher.

Helena Nikonole (RU/TR) & Lucy Ojomoko (RU)

Helena Nikonole is an artist, independent curator and educator currently based in Istanbul. Her field of interests embraces hybrid art, the new aesthetics, the Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence. In her works, she explores the potential of technology, but also the possible risks and dangers that techno-evangelists and scientists do not or cannot take into account.

Lucy Ojomoko is a molecular biologist and artist. She is a researcher at Lab of Gene Engineering, MIPT, BioPharm cluster. Her scientific and artistic research focuses on the field of synthetic neurobiology. She is currently exploring the problem of trans-species and intraspecific communication and studying the limits of plasticity of living systems regarding reprogramming.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lucy_Ojomoko
http://nikonole.com/
https://kersnikova.org/en

Shu Lea Cheang & Ewen Chardronnet – Future Baby Production

UNBORN0x9

Installation – 2022

UNBORN0x9 is an art installation that addresses 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 hi-tech vision of the body as a biological component of a cybernetic communication system.

Ectogenesis, the growth of an embryo and then foetus outside the body of a female organism, poses different ethical challenges: an end to actual pregnancy, but also a possible end to the privileged relationship between mother and child; complete equality of life between women/men/trans/non-binary; the changing nature of the emotional bonds for a child whose gestation took place in a man-made device; the evolution of mores in a society where sexuality and reproduction are separated; the transformation of the notions of maternity and paternity, of couple and family; the development of same-sex parenting; and the risk of a new form of commodification of the human body.

UNBORN0x9 is co-produced by Antre Peaux (Bourges) and ART2M (Paris). It received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2021 in the Artificial Intelligence & Life Art category.

Future Baby Production

Future Baby Production is an initiative by Shu Lea Cheang and Ewen Chardronnet in collaboration with Benjamin Cadon (Labomedia), Jérôme Dubois (echOpen), Thomas Demmer & Quentin Perchais (Qastor), Vivien Roussel (thr34d5) and Svar Simpson.

In 2016, the echOpen fab lab at Hôtel-Dieu hospital in Paris, an open, collaborative project and community fab lab created with the aim of designing a functional, low-cost, open source echo-stethoscope (portable ultrasound device), invited the two artists/authors to apply their artistic practice and skills and both collaborate with and contribute to the community project. A large team of interested artists and cultural facilitators joined the initiative.

The name Future Baby Production represents the common group effort to raise issues such as the possible impact of low-cost echo-stethoscopy on global health issues, questions of access to healthcare and motherhood, ectogenesis and the increasingly technological approach to human reproduction, the imaginary world of science-fiction and the future of science in general.

Shu Lea Cheang is a multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker working in installation and performance art, net.art, public art, video installation, feature length films and web series.

Shu Lea Cheang was in residency at the Cité internationale des arts between 2004 and 2006 through the Cité internationale des arts and the Ministère de la Culture – Direction générale de la création artistique, France.

Ewen Chardronnet is an artist, author, journalist, project manager and curator. He is editor-in-chief of the web magazine Makery.info and writes about citizen science, hacker/maker culture and collaborations between art and science.

https://unborn0x9.labomedia.org/

Edna Bonhomme, Nazila Kivi, Jette Hye Jin Mortensen & Luiza Prado

M/Other: Arts Of Repair

Collective installation – 2022

The curatorial research project M/Other: Arts of Repair looks at the potential for artistic and communal approaches as a way of instigating and facilitating conversations around reproductive justice, racialization and mental health. The project highlights questions of care and trauma as far as the bodies of minorities are concerned and presents how BIPOC experience their encounters with the health system.

The project, situated within an abandoned hospital ward in an otherwise functional psychiatric hospital, explores the possibilities of re-inhabiting institutional healing spaces via communal and artistic practices, thereby raising questions about the traditions, technologies, communities, architectures, policies and epistemologies that direct, control and support the entangled practices of harm and repair of our bodies and minds.

From the vantage of autobiographical archives, artists Luiza Prado and Edna Bonhomme chart reproductive and medical geographies that relay the experiences of the diaspora, health inequities and racialized violence in medical histories. Exploring reproductive justice via communal memory work, artist and independent researcher Nazila Kivi has conducted a series of workshops where participants used creative writing to surmount the traumas of childbirth and rearing children as the member of a minority within the Danish health system. In her work, Jette Hye Jin Mortensen tacked the questions of transnational adoption and epigenetics. Her installation creates and preserves a space where the intersections between colonial violence and various kinds of embodied, intergenerational trauma can be considered.

Edna Bonhomme (HT/US), Nazila Kivi (DK), Jette Hye Jin Mortensen (DK) & Luiza Prado (BR)

Jette Hye Jin Mortensen was born in South Korea and grew up in Denmark. She is an artist, writer, curator, sustainability advocate and permaculture designer with a background in theatre, film and music. Her work deals with so-called friendly activist strategies and building a language around otherness, marginalized identities, non-western feminism, internalized racism and transnational adoption.

Edna Bonhomme is a writer, historian of science and interdisciplinary artist. Edna’s work interrogates contagion, epidemics, and toxicity through decolonial practices and African diaspora worldmaking. A central questions is: What makes people sick? Edna Bonhomme answers this by exploring the spaces and modalities of care and toxicity that shape the possibility for repair.

Luiza Prado de O. Martins examines themes around fertility, reproduction, coloniality, gender, and race. Her ongoing artistic research project, “A Topography of Excesses,” looks into encounters between human and plant beings within the context of herbalist reproductive medicine, approaching these practices as expressions of radical care.

Nazila Kivi is an independent scholar, journalist, activist and a literary critic at one of Denmark’s largest newspapers, Politiken. She is the co-founder and editor of the Danish queer feminist magazine Friktion and teaches the history of the women’s movement, modern eugenics, population politics and radical resistance.

http://www.labae.org/project#/art4med-arts-of-repair

Adriana Knouf

Xenological Preterrelations

Installation – 2022

Time isn’t linear. Touches from the past vibrate out of inert statues, charging our present with the recollection that what appears new today actually has ancient roots. Bolts from futures that we desire force us to figure out what catalysts need to be gathered now to make those possibilities occur.

Adriana Knouf’s work engages with the concept of “xenology”: the study, analysis and development of the xeno (strange, alien, other). This research begins by being rooted in a particular xeno element of herself, being transgender. Nevertheless, the practices extend far beyond limited identity formations and suggest avenues of (self-)experimentation that open all to the possibilities of transformation from within.

Her project continues on from earlier work that she did at Kersnikova Institute and Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana during a Biofriction Residency. The installation presents documentation from a performance in Waag’s Theatricum Anatomicum, What does xen dream of in the theatricum?

Adriana Knouf (NL / US)

Adriana Knouf is an artist, writer and xenologist. She holds a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University.

She engages with topics such as wet media, space art, satellites, radio transmission, non-human encounters, drone flight, queer and trans futurities, machine learning, the voice and papermaking.

She is the founding facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among trans and xeno entities. Adriana Knouf regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond. One of her creations has flown aboard the International Space Station.

Her work has been recognised by a number of awards, including an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021), an Honorary Mention from the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research Award and as a prize winner in The Lake’s Works for Radio #4 (2020).

https://tranxxenolab.net/people/adriana_knouf/
https://waag.org/en/

Martin Howse

Tiny Mining

Video installation and artifacts – 15’31 – 2022

Tiny Mining [TM] is the first open source mining cooperative committed to the potential exploitation of the interior of the living human body, to extract rare earth and other mineral resources for the benefit of human and planetary health.

The wider Tiny Mining community was founded in November 2019, and the initiative is devoted to exploring the culture of self-mining through sharing knowledge, advocacy, discussion, tutorials and collective sweatshops. This open community consists of a diverse group of chemists, geologists, artists and alternative medicine practitioners.

Tiny Mining can also be viewed as an almost ironic speculative fiction project, referring to an imagined Amazon-style exploitation of the human body as a resource. Was this prophetic? There is a definite trend towards the exhaustion of terrestrial mining options and the drive to prospect and exploit undersea, other planets and asteroids. Ironically these projects might place humans within hostile environments which necessitate the exploitation of inner minerals, just to keep these resources within the body and human cycles.

Tiny Miners believe that the earth should remain as pristine and untouched nature. We have no desire to carry on extracting resources from an ever-depleted world. If we are prepared to use technologies which are extractive, then we must be prepared to submit ourselves to this extraction.
Tiny Mining, or, exploring the extreme ecologies of the body…

Tiny Mining was made possible by V2_ and supported by the Alex Adriaanses Residency (DAAR), thanks to the financial support of Gemeente Rotterdam.

Martin Howse (UK)

Martin Howse is a British programmer, writer, performer, artist and explorer working in the fields of discourse, speculative hardware (environmental data in open physical systems), code (an examination of layers of abstraction), free software and the situational (performances and interventions).

http://tinymining.v2.nl/

Emilia Tikka, Oula A. Valkeapää & Leena Valkeapää

Mnemonia

Video installation and artifacts – Two films – 23’47” and 13’43” – 2022

Mnemonia is a collaboration between Emilia Tikka, Oula A Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää. The work consists of three stories that bring together humans, reindeer and the landscape in connection with the migration of reindeer.

The first story is an autobiographical short film made by reindeer herder Oula A Valkeapää, whose life is intimately connected with reindeer and their movements. However, the normal rhythm of migration has become impossible given the current context in the Finnish Arctic, which is traditionally home to the Sámi people. Some of the complex reasons include modernisation, border politics and global warming. Oula A Valkeapää’s story illustrates how the end of nomadic reindeer herding leads to the disappearance of the enduring connection between herder, reindeer and landscape.

The second part of the work is a short film directed by Emilia Tikka, a fictional story about a descendant of reindeer herders, a bioscientist called Marja. In 2102, the Gulf Stream is no more and the climate is gradually cooling after decades without snow. Marja arrives on the beaches of the Arctic Ocean looking for the remains of a lost reindeer. She believes that this particular reindeer holds the epigenetic memories of her ancestors in its bones.

The third part of the work takes the viewer further into the future. Speculative artefacts tell a story of a new nomadic world in 2152, where everyday life follows the rhythm of the reindeer and interspecies memories have been revived thanks to mnemonic bioscience.

The work combines contemporary research in the field of bioscience into transgenerational epigenetic memory and tacit knowledge of human-reindeer relations. The outcome does not separate bioscience and reindeer ontology, but rather weaves them together into a story of arctic survival that is full of hope.

Emilia Tikka (FI), Oula A. Valkeapää & Leena Valkeapää (FI)

Emilia Tikka is a transdisciplinary designer and researcher. Her work explores the philosophical dimensions and cultural implications of contemporary biomedical technologies. Emilia Tikka’s practice of speculative storytelling includes film, designing fictional objects and hands-on laboratory research. She is currently a PhD candidate at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki, Finland. Some of her former affiliations include visiting scholar at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and artist in residence at the laboratories of Max-Delbrück-Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Her current research is supported by a Kone Foundation Grant.

Oula A. Valkeapää lives with reindeers in the Sàmi reindeer herding tradition. Leena Valkeapää is an artist and researcher and a Doctor of Arts. She has been exhibiting as a visual artist since 1988 and has produced several environmental artworks. She is also currently working as a mentor at the Ars Bioartica Residency program in Kilpisjärvi, Finland. Since 2011, Oula A. and Leena Valkeapää have been working together to produce internationally recognized art and work on research-driven projects. Their collaborative creations focus on human-reindeer relations.

www.emiliatikka.com
https://bioartsociety.fi/

Clara Sukyong Jo

De Anima

Video triptych – 30’48 – 2021

The starting point of De Anima was field research carried out in Myanmar in 2018 with wildlife veterinarians from the Smithsonian, who were hunting for new coronavirus strains in order to predict their pandemic potential.

In 2018, the Smithsonian team invited Clara Jo to Myanmar, where they were looking at new strains transmitted from bats to humans.

The sacred caves depicted in De Anima are both high-risk interfaces and the site of a spiritual joining between humans and animals, science and religion, nature and politics – interfaces where ecosystems meet and feed into global conflict.

The second half of De Anima was filmed in Kenya in 2019 at the Ol Jogi Wildlife Conservancy — Kenya’s second largest rhino sanctuary. Increased human-animal interactions coupled with rapid deforestation and urbanization has not only led to the emergence and spread of zoonotic pathogens, but also orphaned wild animals who need critical care.

The camera traverses these rich, biodiverse landscapes revealing the artificial way in which humans perceive and construct nature. Their hybrid physicalities give voice to the nonhuman, the landscape, and wildlife, which is often reduced to silence in the usual anthropocentric narratives.

De Anima exposes a reality that is not a new phenomenon, but rather a subtext to the pandemic. It reveals deeper issues in society, namely that we are neglecting environmental health in an era of accelerated globalization. How can we imagine a world in which physical and psychological borders are broken down?

De Anima relays the message that we all must share responsibility for the future of our health as a global community.

Clara Sukyong Jo (US)

Clara Sukyong Jo is in residency as part of the “Art Explora x Cité internationale des arts” programme.

Clara Sukyong Jo lives and works in Berlin. She is a graduate of Bard College (NY) and the Institut für Raumexperimente / Universität der Künste Berlin. Her work has been exhibited and screened at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart (Berlin), Neue Nationalgalerie (Berlin); ARKO Art Center (Seoul); Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst (Oldenburg); Spike Island (Bristol); Savvy Contemporary (Berlin); ICA London; and the Alliance Ethio-Française d’Addis-Abeba. She has presented her work on panels at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Arts London. She was a recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship.

Practical information

From September 28th to October 22nd, 2022
Wednesday to Saturday, from 2 pm to 7 pm
Extended hours every Wednesday, from 2 pm to 9 pm
Galerie of the Cité internationale des arts
Free admission

Accessibility

The Cité internationale des arts regrets that its exhibition spaces do not meet today’s standards of accessibilitý to people with reduced mobility and is working on it for the future. For any request concerning the accessibilitý of the spaces of the Cité internationale des arts, it is possible to respond on a case-by-case basis. Write to: programmation@citedesartsparis.fr

Le festival OPEN SOURCE BODY est une coproduction d’Art2M/Makery/MCD et de la Cité internationale des arts, organisée dans le cadre du programme ART4MED – art meets health and biomedical research co-financé par le programme Europe Créative de l’Union Européenne.

In Theodore Sturgeon’s science fiction novel The More Than Human (1953), a group of humans with unusual disabilities and powers enter into a symbiotic relationship to create a self-sustaining living organism, composed of several individuals.

This concept of “More-Than-Human” is taken up today in environmental philosophy to counter the nature-culture dualism and the hegemonic exceptionalism of the human.

If the exhibition “More Than Living” marks the need to feel more alive than ever in a post COVID-19 society, it also invites us to take a renewed look, “More Than Human”, at our existences in the terrestrial environment.

Finally, the exhibition examines how certain social groups or individuals can be coerced, stigmatised or disenfranchised in a normative society.

Green Open Food Evolution

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ARTISTE: Maya MINDER

This project is supported by the project More-Than-Planet (2022-2025) co-funded by the Creative Europ Program of the European Union.

Maya Minder (CH)

The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology

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Production credits:

It has received the support of the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research and Art, the Government of Catalonia’s Department of Culture and the Fundació Güell, with additional collaboration from Escafior Films, Klinikum Stuttgart and Zeiss Cinematography.

Albert García-Alzórriz (ES)

Jupiter Space

Jupiter Space is an installation based on the French translation (to be published in October 2022) of the article “Exterminating Fetuses: Abortion, Disarmament, and the Sexo-Semiotics of Extraterrestrialism” by Zoë Sofia, originally published in Diacritics magazine in 1984.

Zoë Sofia’s amusing, extra-terrestrial work raises the paradox of how a conservative state can defend a pro-life stance, while at the same time possessing weapons of mass destruction under the guise of “defending life”.

READ MORE...

READ LESS...

Estelle Benazet Heugenhauser (FR/AT) & Cindy Coutant (FR)

Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System

READ MORE...

READ LESS...

However, we can expand this understanding in terms of bio-semiotics and see it as a new sensory organ with specific ability to redefine the existing signal system (smells) and use a familiar (olfactory) sensation to encode and decode the information on a biochemical level.

Helena Nikonole (RU/TR) & Lucy Ojomoko (RU)

UNBORN0x9

UNBORN0x9 is co-produced by Antre Peaux (Bourges) and ART2M (Paris). It received an Honorary Mention at the Prix Ars Electronica 2021 in the Artificial Intelligence & Life Art category.

Future Baby Production

M/Other: Arts Of Repair

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READ LESS...

Edna Bonhomme (HT/US), Nazila Kivi (DK), Jette Hye Jin Mortensen (DK) & Luiza Prado (BR)

Xenological Preterrelations

Her project continues on from earlier work that she did at Kersnikova Institute and Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana during a Biofriction Residency. The installation presents documentation from a performance in Waag’s Theatricum Anatomicum, What does xen dream of in the theatricum?

Adriana Knouf (NL / US)

Tiny Mining

Tiny Mining [TM] is the first open source mining cooperative committed to the potential exploitation of the interior of the living human body, to extract rare earth and other mineral resources for the benefit of human and planetary health.

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Tiny Mining was made possible by V2_ and supported by the Alex Adriaanses Residency (DAAR), thanks to the financial support of Gemeente Rotterdam.

Martin Howse (UK)

Mnemonia

Mnemonia is a collaboration between Emilia Tikka, Oula A Valkeapää and Leena Valkeapää. The work consists of three stories that bring together humans, reindeer and the landscape in connection with the migration of reindeer.

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The third part of the work takes the viewer further into the future. Speculative artefacts tell a story of a new nomadic world in 2152, where everyday life follows the rhythm of the reindeer and interspecies memories have been revived thanks to mnemonic bioscience.

Emilia Tikka (FI), Oula A. Valkeapää & Leena Valkeapää (FI)

De Anima

The starting point of De Anima was field research carried out in Myanmar in 2018 with wildlife veterinarians from the Smithsonian, who were hunting for new coronavirus strains in order to predict their pandemic potential.

In 2018, the Smithsonian team invited Clara Jo to Myanmar, where they were looking at new strains transmitted from bats to humans.

The sacred caves depicted in De Anima are both high-risk interfaces and the site of a spiritual joining between humans and animals, science and religion, nature and politics – interfaces where ecosystems meet and feed into global conflict.

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The camera traverses these rich, biodiverse landscapes revealing the artificial way in which humans perceive and construct nature. Their hybrid physicalities give voice to the nonhuman, the landscape, and wildlife, which is often reduced to silence in the usual anthropocentric narratives.

De Anima relays the message that we all must share responsibility for the future of our health as a global community.

Clara Sukyong Jo (US)

Le festival OPEN SOURCE BODY est une coproduction d’Art2M/Makery/MCD et de la Cité internationale des arts, organisée dans le cadre du programme ART4MED – art meets health and biomedical research co-financé par le programme Europe Créative de l’Union Européenne.