Prenatal Memory and Species (2022)
Video installation
In this piece, I explore the theory of evolution, the maternal principle and cyborgness. After my grandmother, whom I loved very much, passed away in February of this year, I began to think about the human species and its survival in the process of examining why we are born and die. The process by which a human fetus is formed in the mother's womb is truly like watching evolutionary theory in fast forward. The Japanese scholar Michizou Noguchi used the term "primordial life form" to describe our human beginnings. In Japan, when a child is born, it is customary to keep the umbilical cord that connects the child to its mother.
It is said that the umbilical cord has the effect of repelling evil spirits and that if the child keeps it as a talisman and has it placed in the coffin when they die, they will be reunited with their dead mother in heaven. The substance assembled of the silicone pregnant belly in the installation is actually the umbilical cord that connected me to my mother.
This dried out little cellular substance speaks to me about the genes of the female lineage and its matrix, and at the same time, I cannot help to feel both cyborgness and primordial life form in these tiny, oddly shaped cells. Philosopher Donna Haraway refers to cyborgs in this way: “The cyborg is a place where the ambivalence of the literal and the figurative is in constant operation, a deeply and historically specific corporeality that cannot be denied. Also, cyborgs are not born, they have mothers. The cyborg does not have a mother, but it has a matrix. It is not born in a garden, but in history."