Trans*Plant : May the Chlorophyll be with/in you

Kina Madno (part of Qumera Rosa collective) / nomadic — Jan 8, 2019

Kina Madno, »Trans*Plant : May the Chlorophyll be with /in you«, 2018, Planetary Glitch

March 2016: Beginning of the Trans*Plant project by Quimera Rosa, which aims to experiment, within the current environmental crisis, a process that engages a body towards a human&plant transition.

December 2017: First chlorophyll intravenous injection, at Kapelica Gallery, in Slovenia.

March 2036: The annual Earth resources are exhausted and we witness the global Internet final shutdown.

December 2037: A bio-hackers community decides to connect a VPN to Mycorrhiza – the network that allows earth plants to exchange nutrients and information – in order to establish a symbiotic alliance with them and to try to reverse the situation.

»Trans*Plant: May the Chlorophyll be with /in you« is a multimedia installation project, that aims to present the work behind Trans*Plant, as well as to produce a situated and non-distopic speculative fiction. It is a piece based on haptic and hybrid low-technologies, where leftovers from the past and the future get entangled. Videos, written narratives, scientific excerpts, Mycorrhiza interacting with the audience, and DIY biotechnological materials will be part of the elements that establish the connection between the theme and the transdisciplinary and experimental form of this lab installation. This installation will be carried out in different residencies of research, development and production during 2019. This multimedia writing is complemented by a textual one, in the form of a self-sci fi novel by Kina Madno whose publication in French is scheduled for 2021.
For »Planetery Glitch« the proposal is to create a low-tech multimedia net art piece, based on meetings of biohackers in 2035, in order to prepare the second Trans * Plant manifesto. This piece would be an heteroglossic one (Arabic, Spanish, English and French) as between mid-January and mid-February I will be in Morocco, Spain, California and France. The content would form part of the installation and the novel, with mention to their conditions of creation and production.

Trans * Plant manifesto – first version – 2016 – fragments
[…] The greatest problem with the dominant ecology is that it is based on the notion of ›nature,‹ a notion created historically to separate humanity from the rest of the universe and establish a colonial relationship. The binomial culture / nature structures an almost infinite list of other binomials found in modern Western thought: man / woman, white / non-white, hetero / homo, science / witchcraft, adult / child, normal / abnormal … The second term of each binomial is associated with nature and is therefore subdued to the same regime of violence. Through heterotrophy carried out to its maximum, a necropolitics is constituted so that it literally ›consumes‹ everything on this planet. […] It is time to conceive ›ungrid-able ecologies‹ (Natasha Myers), or ›un-greening the green‹ (Jens Hauser).
[…] In order to be able to think about a non-anthropocentric ecology we need to move from identities based on essences to identities based on relationships. A human&plant transition process that includes an intravenous chlorophyll protocol which through fears, fantasies and judgments that it generates, opens the debate on the identity system. A self-experimentation process is not an individual’s process, it’s always a collective one. Obtaining a pure molecule of chlorophyll is as hard as getting testosterone from the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry or the legal and health system. All life is patented.

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