Art and the Microbiome

Abstract

The duo Art Orienté Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin) develops performative art practices engaging with political and environmental issues since the early 1990s, increasingly involving biomedical self-experimentation as well as human and non-human animal microbiota as new milieux within which to perform. Using microbiota as new places for microperformativity follows the duo's previous staging of experiencing immune otherness through horse blood injection in their 2011 performance May the Horse Live in Me, in which artist Laval-Jeantet was injected with compatibilized horse blood, thus displacing the action to an invisible molecular scale. Their two recent microbiome-based art experiences shift the focus further to eco-systemic otherness, involving microbes ‘as actors’: May the Rain Forest Live in Me (or May the Pygmy Live in Me) and Holy Coli, the Mouse in Odor of Sanctity.

May the Rain Forest Live in Me (or May the Pygmy Live in Me) consists of the grafting of the microbiota of a Pygmy – his internal ecosystem – onto the artist body, thus questioning both the inner human ecosystem and the human Umwelt, revealing the complexity of the globalized modern world, and, consequently, the indiscriminate destruction caused by the technological society in the name of development, with the complex consequences of globalization on our biological systems. Holy Coli, The Mice in Odor of Sanctity is a biotechnological art intervention consisting of the transformation of the microbiota of a mouse with genetically modified Escherichia Coli to enable a mice's excrement to express odours close to violet scents. Both experiments highlight a biosemiotic viewpoint that leads to an invisible science-fictive universe where imagination goes beyond the visible trust and experienceable spectacularization. Such performative works also shed light on the aims and conditions of the manipulation of the living being conceived as an environmental whole, via a specific stage for co-corporeality.

Notes

1 The performance May the Horse Live in Me (Que le cheval vive en moi) took place at the Art Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana/ Slowenia, on 22 February 2011.

2 The term ‘pygmy’, which formerly, since the early nineteenth century, has been employed in a depreciative manner by Westerners describing bodily criteria suggesting a diminutive height, is today proudly claimed by the forest populations of Equatorial Africa themselves as an important label in the struggle for the survival of their millennial culture. For this reason, African studies scholars (such as myself) engaged in a fight with them to highlight the importance of their culture, consciously use this term as a political statement. See Epelboin (2012).

3 The exhibition ‘An Imagined Museum Review –Unforgettable art from the year 2052’ (‘Un musée imaginé, et si l’art disparaissait?’) has been shown at Tate Liverpool in 2015, and at the Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2016; curated by Hélène Guenin, Alexandra Müller, Francesco Manacorda, Darren Pih and Peter Gorschlüter, from the collections of Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Modern and MMK Frankfurt.

4 Sophie Delpeux lists all holders of Manzoni’s Artist’s Shit cans in the catalogue edited by Bernard Bazile: Les propriétaires (Institut d’Art Contemporain de Villeurbanne, 2004).