Credit: BORUT PETERLIN
Maja Smrekar (SI)
What are we? Where do we come from and where are we going? Maja Smrekar’s artistic work revolves around these eternal questions of humanity. The work series K-9_topology, winner of the Golden Nica, consists of the four consecutive projects shown here, which each focus from different perspectives on the essence and the role of human beings and especially the role of a woman in increasingly tough bio political conditions of the present times.
The artist creates symbolic points of connection, to make a symbolic action – in other words, the co-evolution between a human and a dog has been used as a matrix for the question: what in the ecologically ruined, over populated and economically compromised world defines humans as a superior species?
Ecce Canis
In the Ecce Canis, the artist explores a parallel evolution between a wolf, human and a dog, and as a result of the research composes a spherical cave where the visitors could smell the serotonin based odor, extracted out of the platelets of her and her dog companion Byron, since living with dogs for thousands of years turned out to be one of the parameters for the mutation of the gene SLC6A4, that regulates the serotonin transporter in humans.
I Hunt Nature And Culture Hunts Me
The interspecies collaboration resulted in the performance I Hunt Nature And Culture Hunts Me (created during a residency in the French JACANA Wildlife Studios). Starting from the phylogenetics (study of the evolutionary history of an organism) and continuing into an ethology (the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour) of a wolf, it revolves around the relationship between wolf, dog, and human.
Hybrid Family
The project Hybrid Family thematizes the social and ideological instrumentalization of the female body and breastfeeding. For three months Maja Smrekar was submitted to a specific living conditions (a diet and a mechanical stimulation) to promote lactation. A side effect of this process was the production of the hormone oxytocin, which plays an important role in fostering trust and empathy between mother and child and consequently towards the society as a whole. The artist was able to observe this in her interaction with her dog.
ARTE_mis
ARTE_mis is the fourth and mostly discussed project in the series. A reproductive cell from the artist was denucleated and the genetic material (the DNA) was removed from the cell. The denucleated cell then served as a host for an extracted body cell from her dog companion Ada. Both cells were fused together. The result is not to be equated with a fertilization, but rather a hybrid cell was created, even though it is not capable of further development. Therefore the artist symbolically placed the cell materials in an equal cohabitation relationship as an artistic artefact.
Despite the fact that the project carries a plethora of biotechnological potentials, it at the same time primarily serves as a civil tactical media that evokes a public discourse and serves as a reference to think beyond humanist limitations in order to embrace the risks that becoming-other-than human bring in the future.
