Trans*Plant: Open the Pill

Trans*Plant is a transdisciplinary research project that reflects on the black boxes of expert knowledge and the infrastructures – normative, technical, ideological – that dominate the politics of the living, health and bodies. Based on self-experimentation and the use of DIWO (do it with others) methodologies, it is developed through several interconnected lines of work. Open the Identity consists of the implantation of a chip in the body of one of the members of the collective, similar to the chips used for pets, guinea pigs and livestock  for their identification and insertion in the database networks. Open the Pill is a community health proposal and a critique of the notion of the healthy body, which investigates photodynamic therapy in the treatment of genital warts caused by the human papillomavirus (HPV). The performance Open the Molecule takes the imagination of a possible plant-becoming-human to a molecular level through a real, live transfusion of chlorophyll. For its part, Open the Seed opens the debate on biopatents and the survival of colonial mechanisms in access to health: based on an action with seeds of Artemisia Annua, the plant from which the active ingredient of antimalarials was recently extracted, anticipates a future of coexistence between different medicinal traditions. Finally, the story Open the Code brings together these different planes in a speculative fiction about the encounters between species, halfway between artistic research, activism and open science. 
 
In the exhibition Whispers, hubbub, and paradoxes. Attempts towards a politics of enunciation, we present the archaeological remains of the future of the project Trans*Plant, which include the video of the performance of the first chlorophyll intravenous transfusion, the research for Open the Pill, the Manifesto Trans*Plant and the newspaper that was published after the fall of the internet in 2036.

Quimera Rosa
 

Created in Barcelona in 2008, Quimera Rosa is a laboratory for experimentation and research on identities, bodies and technosciences formed by Ce Quimera and Kina Madno. From a transfeminist and post-identitarian perspective, they seek to experiment with hybrid and flexible identities that can blur the boundaries of the binomials on which modern Western thought is based: natural/artificial, normal/abnormal, man/woman, hetero/homo, animal/plant, reality/fiction... Quimera Rosa makes the body a platform for public intervention, in order to generate ruptures in the frontier between the public and the private. Particularly interested in the articulation between art, science and technology, as well as their roles in the production of subjectivity, their work focuses on the development of performances and transdisciplinary projects, interactive installations, the elaboration of devices that work with bodily activity and experimentations of biohacking and microbiology. They complement this activity by giving numerous workshops, writing and doing curatorial and production work based on food and networking. In recent years they have focused on the project Trans*Plant (since 2016), which uses living systems and is based on self-experimentation: a process involving a transition from human to plant in various formats, working with the idea of realm dysphoria and becoming less human than human. Most of their work is done collaboratively and always free of patents and proprietary code. Their work has been presented in streets, contemporary art centre, bars, galleries, universities, concert halls, art schools, discos, museums, scientific laboratories, self-managed centres, festivals and theatres.