Demiurgós City and Science Biennial
Demiurgós was born from the collaboration of two artists and a scientist from the University of Barcelona who studies planarians, extraordinarily queer beings. They reproduce asexually in a clonal manner or sexually via hermaphroditism. Their immortal bodies contain stem cells capable of regenerating all their parts and functions.
This project explores the crossovers that problematise the anthropocentric Western view of biological life. Demiurgós deconstructs the cellular atlas that science makes of planarians in order to generate conditions of possibility where art and philosophy recover the hidden animal. Reflecting on our limitations, we can imagine the possible and the impossible, based on a sympoietic dialogue in which the planarian and human bodies are intertwined.
Nature is above all, and predominantly, queer. Maja Bondestam describes in When the Plant Kingdom Became Queer: On Hermaphrodites and Linnaean Language of Nonnormative Sex (2016) how Linné (1735) had no choice but to include notions of gender fluidity, bisexual behaviour or hermaphroditism in his taxonomy. Focusing on such evidence could have been a revolutionary act, but the morality of the patriarchal-colonial Enlightenment project shied away from that possibility.
For further information: biennalciutaticiencia.barcelona
