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The text below was published in the book ‘Performance Presente Futuro’, organized by Daniela Labra, curator of the showcase with the same name, which took place in Rio de Janeiro, 2008. The publication also brings articles by Stelarc, Bia Medeiros, Ricardo Dominguez, Silvio de Gracia and Rosangella Leote, besides records of the event. Click here to read more about Performance Presente Futuro.

I’ve always considered life as a recoverable aesthetical phenomenon and my body as the first material at my disposal. I’ve used my body and/or the representation of my body in almost all of my works.

“To work with the body, with your own body means to unite the intimate and the social. The feminist struggles brought to the core of historical problems the evidence that the body is political” (Christine Buci-Glucksmann). I belong to a generation for which to show the body, to speak about sexuality, about your pleasure, was not easy at all; we wouldn’t speak of contraception and abortion either. Our bodies didn’t belong to us and it was in this context that I’ve decided to create, with this support and with this kind of relation.

My works are mingled with my existence. For each series of works, it was necessary to reenter the stage, to face, to reface oneself. It also meant to create moments of intensity for oneself and for others.

I’ve changed my face by placing a figure over it, that is, a representation. I’ve worked with the Copenhagen’s police using my DNA. I’ve sold my “artist kisses” and pieces of my flesh in Reliquaries. I’ve sold my blood in the series Holy Shrouds and the sky has not fallen on my head. I’ve acted with no fear, not at all influenced or threatened by the ancestral and collective fear of attempting against the integrity of the body. This anachronism comes from the idea that the body – considered in ancient times as God’s masterpiece – is sacred and untouchable, not subject to transformation.

My reliquaries are made of my flesh and a fragment of a text by Michel Serres, translated into several languages. “What could the current, tattooed, ambidextrous monster, hermaphrodite and half breed, make us see now under his skin? Yes, flesh and blood. Science speaks of organs, functions, cells, and molecules, to admit finally that it’s been a long time since life has been spoken of in laboratories, but it never says flesh, which, very precisely, designates the mixture of muscles and blood, skin and hairs, bones, nerves, and diverse functions, which thus mixes what the relevant disciplines analyse.

Life throws the dice or plays cards. Harlequin discovers, in the end, his flesh. Combined, the mixed flesh and blood of the Harlequin is still quite likely to be taken for a harlequin coat.” (The Troubador of Knowledge, Michel Serres).

I’ve fully read the text Laïcité in the surgical block throughout my fifth permanent surgical operation entitled “opera-operation” with a harlequin hat on my head. I reread this text in a performance that hybridized and recycled my collection of clothes and, finally, for the biopsy of cells from my skin in the Faculty of Biology and Anatomy of the Perth University (Australia). This gesture was necessary for the re-elaboration of “The Harlequin Coat”, a mixed media installation conceived during her residency at Symbiotica, the art and science collaborative research laboratory, University of Western Australia.

The Harlequin Coat is being exhibited at the Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth, Australia (BEAP 07), 10-23 September 2007, at the Bakery Artrage Complex as part of the exhibition SymbioticA’s Still, Living, curated by Jens Hauser. It is presently at FACT in Liverpool and in another version it will travel to the “Casino Luxembourg” in Luxembourg in September 2009: it is an installation in progress.

The central element of the installation The Harlequin Coat is a tissue engineering bioreactor especially designed and built for a gallery environment and with the needs of an exhibition in mind.

The bioreactor recreates the environmental conditions necessary for cell growth and nourishment, and contains within it three polymers on which we find the living my skin cells, recently collected during a biopsy performed in Perth, the skin cells of a 12-week old female foetus of African origin, and fibro-blast muscle cells of a fat-tailed dunnart, a marsupial. The cells of African provenance were obtained from a US laboratory and shipped frozen to Australia, while the dunnart cells are from an animal leftover from scientific research at the University of Western Australia. On one of the polymers we find the three cells in the process of hybridising and in Fact in Liverpool, the co-cultures were with swan cells and bovine cells.

The whole is then lit by a projection of diamonds, each containing macro images of cells, some of these in movement. The cells that appear in the petri dishes and in the projection include human brain (cerebral cortex), lactating breast, cervix, menstrual endometrium, lip, skin (thin, thick scalp), umbilical cord and vagina, as well as monkey eye (retina), primate ovary, rabbit tongue (fungiform and filiform) and sheep tongue (vallate). The live cells in the projection comprise the three growing and hybridizing cells found in the bioreactor (my cells, the African foetus skin cells, and the fat-tailed dunnart fibro-blast cells), as well human blood, connective tissue and muscle of a mouse, neurons of a goldfish and many other forms of her origins.

This piece has been inspired by French philosopher Michel Serres who uses the metaphor of the Harlequin in the preface to his book The Troubadour of Knowledge, entitled Laïcité, a concept usually translated in English as “secularism”, but not adequately captured by this English label. The metaphor of the Harlequin represents the idea of multiculturalism and the acceptance of the other within oneself, with or without religion.

The installation will evolve over the course of several exhibitions. Each time, newly grown my cells will be co-cultured with cells of other origin and the petri dishes will slowly be filled.

The proposal by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of working at the Symbiotica labs enthused me, evidently, but for me it was necessary that it was inscribed in the coherence and continuity of my works, that the logic of this new perspective generously opened by Symbiotica could become yet another link in my work between body and surgery, body and medicine, art and science, and, finally, between art and biotechnologies.

Skin culture is common for serious cases of burning. To made a culture of my own skin was, therefore, a “common” act; less common was cultivating it along with the cell of a foetus of a Black woman (bought in a lab), which take a quite special meaning in Liverpool, as they also would take in Nantes, if this project were done in 2004 during the Biotech exhibition, of the curator Jens Hauser, because both cities have a charged past in relation to slavery. The cells of marsupials resonate more in Australia.

Scientifically, the experience could mean that things were already predefined and that the winner was known before the fight: the young cells wining over mine… The acknowledgement of yet another classic and normal victory of the stronger over the weaker interested me, although Fiona Wood had stated that many criteria could alter the course of the experience.

As I also knew beforehand that the hybridation of skins of different origins would not develop a different skin color.

The stance of this acknowledgment, similar to the one of a readymade – although a modified ready-made – is in the logic of my surgical-performances operations. Since a minimum amendment of the ready-made/body changes its meaning.

But the body for me is no longer this ready-made just waiting to be signed, as the artist Piero Manzoni did in the 1960′s. The two small protuberances inserted in my temples are a deviation of the traditional implants used to highlight the cheeks, transforming the body into a place of public debate.

The collected cells of my body no longer belong to me, I wouldn’t be able to sell them as works of art: I took the risk of creating a work that costs me a great deal, that is hard to show and that in theory I cannot sell.

A step forward in order to feel free to create, to study and to fall in love outside the control of the works by the market, as in my The Kiss of the Artist.

The position of the living being in the installation, so fragile, as the Harlequin’s face that becomes the bio-reactor, the place of the Harlequin’s dramatic passage from life to death – reminding a framed memento mori, fantasized in a large video projection – showing at the same time the living cells dying or already dead inside lozenges sutured by the whitelight mixed with all colors.

Adapted from an article published in HAUSER, Jens (Ed.). SK-INTERFACES. Exploding Borders in Art, Science and Technology. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008.

Orlan was born and works in Paris, New York and Los Angeles. She currently works with sculpture and digital photography for the Self Hybridization series, at the same time she develops work with biotechnologies.