Liminal Practices: being disobedient and transfeminist

Last year with the support of Impetus4CS we, ALMA Futura produced Xenopia Libera, a podcast, a story of a scientific research and a sound protocol. In an era in which access to abortion is increasingly limited, it is urgent that we equip ourselves with tools for autonomy and self-management. That is why we hack the technologies that control and repress us, and liberate the living organic interfaces that are exploited. We talk about frogs used as pregnancy tests, beta HCG hormone, contestative biology and struggles for reproductive rights.

‘The Witch in the lab coat’, our second episode, introduces our theoretical and methodological approach to research: transfeminist biohacking. When biohacking meets feminism, the boundaries of the body disappear, providing us with tools for radical education on all that science seeks to normalise and control. Transfeminist biohacking has the flavour of porn, the charm of eroticism, and the pain of history. Here references to witches are inevitable. What could be more akin to laboratory work than the dark rituals performed in the witch’s room? However, sometimes scientists and witches seem to be opposites.

The collective CAE, Critical Art Ensamble coined the idea of Civil Biotechnical Disobedience, which starts from a very important premise and is perhaps the central issue of biohacking as a political practice. The idea that non-experts or specialists in the field of science and biotechnology have gradually distanced themselves, losing all say in the political consequences.

WORKSHOPOLOGY ↗

In Open Source Extrogens, Mary Maggic tells us: Contested biology, through hacking, is a form of social resistance in which members of the non-specialist public conduct scientific research beyond institutional walls in order to challenge the status quo. The experiment is conducted in public, focusing on the individual who acquires knowledge outside their area of expertise and situates this process within the public sphere

Tired of repressed, impenetrable and homogenous bodies, we are resetting and migrating our bodies, modificable codes, lubricated and fluid, far from this sad landscape. Pechblenda is injected into our veins as an antidote to the heteropatriarchal arrogance that surrounds us. A disturbance, a transhackerfeminist electronic distortion.

tRANS hACK fEMINISt
MANIFESTO ↗

GynePunk are the cyborg witches of DIY gynaecology who want to update ancestral knowledge by using technology independently – an extreme and precise way of freeing our bodies from their compulsive dependence on the fossilised structures of the dominant healthcare system.

ON MANIFESTO RABIA ↗

SF, string figuring for me also means the other SF words, science fiction, speculative fabulation, speculative feminism, science fact, and maybe most important of all, so far. The crucial capacity to not know, to be wrong, to let go, to experiment, to go visiting, to think beyond what is too certain, unknowing in order to connect otherwise.

So far, not knowing.

Donna Haraway for Next Nature

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Lament an installation and performance that makes space for the contemplation of death as an ecology, and harnesses solastalgia and ecological grief as artistic and epistemological tools for the times to come – part of untaming death, which researches more-than-human perspectives on death in times of eco-disruption.

By Margherita Pevere

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We are portable ecosystems – transpecies alliances of seemingly infinite complexity and plasticity.

We the Bacteria: Notes toward a bionic Architecture, an exhibition and a book to rethink the very idea of shelter in terms of forms of inclusion rather than prophylactic forms of exclusion.

Observing architecture and the microbiome as a co-evolutionary practice and a field of continuous negotiation between bodies, materials and microorganisms

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In an era when digital technology profoundly shapes our lives, Erinni and ALMA Futura proposed an intersectional transfeminist symposium to ask questions about the ideologies and the powers behind these systems. We invited researchers and artists from Rome’s cultural community to take part in two days of collective reflection at Mattatoio.

An opportunity to explore disobedient approaches and bottom-up knowledge, promoting a ritualistic reappropriation of digital infrastructures.Watch the 5 roundtables of Simbionti: Practices of Coexistence between art, care and technology for Disobedient Rituals

WATCH SIMBIONTI ↗