May the chlorophyll be with/in you

First intravenous chlorophyll transfusion

Performance carried out @ Kapelica Gallery, Liubliana, Slovenia. On December 5, 2017. With the special collaboration of Rebeca Paz & Roy.

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, straight / queer, 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. ‘Protecting nature’ seems to be a bad idea… It is strange that one has come to accept that an individual, delimited by the skin, constitutes a living being, but the planet as a whole doesn’t. 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. The performance in the Kapelica gallery is based on an intravenous chlorophyll transfusion. It is conceived as a collective ritual that crystallizes the process before and after it. An intravenous one, which through fears, fantasies and judgments that it generates, opens the debate on the identity system. The self-experimentation process is not an individual’s process, since the people accompanying the one receiving the intravenous drip are transitioning with her. Those transitioning are permanently modified through the feedback loop. Beyond these specific routes, it is the social norms that are questioned. 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.

This performance would not have been possible without the ecosystem that helps us in so many ways.