Holobionts explores possible multiple universes: post-humanist, post-digital, post-capitalist, ecofeminist, and cyborg, which challenges our universal anthropocentric conception.

On a wooden shelf rest five encyclopedic books: Masters of World Literature (Italy, Germany, England, France, and Spain). Each of these books is also a container of soil from which plant shoots emerge. These living objects are connected to a tablet where the viewer can see and hear an ASMR performance, thus becoming part of the holobiont.

Quoting the Laboria Cuboniks collective in their Xenofeminist manifesto: “We are all alienated,” but have we ever been otherwise? We are alienated, fragmented, and yet embodied—hybrid beings. Donna Haraway, a pioneering thinker and scientist, and a key figure for xenofeminists, already defined this being inhabiting this Anthropocene in her Cyborg Manifesto in the 1980s. A humanoid, a fused-confused being that needs no distinctions, rejects rigid boundaries, and renders structures permeable.

Holobionts is a collective of strange agents (actant)2 from another dimension, who aim to question how the human animal is traversed and shaped by that western paradigm underlying the codes of an accelerated and fragile contemporary existence where collapse becomes visible and inevitable.

Holobionts

Facility

Variable Measures

Juan Manuel Blanes Museum

August 2022