Picatrix-AI: A heifer would be needed for the sacrifice
A Tramway Commission for Take Me Somewhere festival
Online Stream
Premiere
*Tickets: Access to all Take Me Somewhere festival works and events are via their Festival Pass. Visit their website for info/booking > *
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A speculative, biohacked performance of multispecies IVF.
In this work, Picatrix-AI recalls the veiled spectacle of contemporary xenotransplantation, as it ellipses the longstanding, racialising and imperialist histories of medical experimentation and enslaved gestational labour. Through a reframing of mythological genealogy and embodiment of the Chimera-as-scientist, this performance of biohacked multispecies IVF presents the ethical predicaments within the socio-technological drive towards a hierarchical and designed auto-gestation of the human species.
The performance responds to Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s interventions that demonstrate the categories of “race” and “species” as mutually reinforcing terms in Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World.
READING/LISTENING REQUIREMENT: An extract of Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World by Zakiyyah Iman Jackson will be posted on the Take Me Somewhere website and the Festival Hub in May, as a PDF and an audio recording. Although this can be read by audiences in their own time in the run up to the performance, the artist also invites attendees to read or listen to the extract at 8.15pm before the performance begins at 8.30pm on Fri 28 May.
Ages 18+
Content warning: The performance will have direct reference to terminated pregnancy. It will feature sexually explicit content. It will have direct and indirect reference to colonialism and racism.
About the artist
Picatrix-AI is a modular group led in this iteration by Soojin Chang.
Soojin Chang (b. 1991, California) is an interdisciplinary artist engaged in using performance as research to call forth a multispecies commune. Chang has exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York), ICA London, CCA Glasgow, Microscope Gallery (New York), Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh) and Addis Video Art Festival (Addis Ababa).
Credits
Sound Design: J.E. Battah
Producer: Claricia Parinussa
Photos: Kong Dara and Kong Siden (Sa Sa Art Projects).