A work: part code/part writing/part drawing, with genomic data pulsing through a terranium of plants and glass vials, tubes and vessel, that come together as a ‘living diagram’.

 

Here, digital means, from genome sequencing, to digital bio-prospecting tools, have informed a reductionist conception of the ‘genome’ that has assisted the enclosure of the Genetic Commons and the policing of newly established and highly contested forms of private property.

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Accompanied by a Biopiracy Apothecary that collates a display of my research into the appropriation of indigenous knowledge by pharmaceutical companies, underwritten by patenting laws built around the 'novel' reading of mutation, that in turn permits Intellectual Property claims and an enclosure of the genomic commons. The concept of the apothecary refers to both the person who manufactured and dispensed medicines, and the shop where they were sold.  It draws historically upon how value in a then burgeoning pharmaceutical industry was derived from colonial expansion, implying that little has changed.

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Much art that addresses climate change, albeit with an intersectional approach, simply ignores the importance of the human construct of an economic system that derives value from extractive principles: from environmental systems to living entities.

 

Data is central to this - both as bio-information, and behavioural analysis.

 

There is an urgent need to focus on how this informs/facilitates neoliberalisms trade agreements and contractual legalese, in continuing a particularly egregious neo-colonialism. The work will contain within its distorted vials and flasks, the central role of genomics today, mapping a neo-colonial bioinformatic drift from the global south to the global north. A capacity opened up by portable sequencing devices used by bioprospectors to collect digitised genomic data from bio-diverse hotspots, that despite attempts to legislate (CBD) manage to avoid paying sovereign states where they are found.

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Symbiogenesis

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Overall, I am interested in what an emphasis on a Post-Human Eco-Nomics could bring to the challenges of climate crisis.

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The shift in thinking that this proposes, could consider the difference regarding concepts of mutation (Darwin) versus the symbiogenesis of Lynn Margulis (and others).

 

These ideas may appear abstract, but ‘symbiogenesis’ facilitates an understanding that embraces complexity, and recognizes that every visible life-form is a combination or community of bacteria, that acquires characteristics from it’s environment.

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On the other hand, ‘mutation’ has been co-opted in terms of it’s capacity as a ‘novel’ (the important part) genetic modification via either gene editing i.e. CRISPR, or bacterial enzymes, that enable large corporations to own genomic code taken from natural resources, as their intellectual property via patenting claims.

 

This then in turn introduces a starkly contradictory idea of ‘piracy’: permitting companies such as Monsanto to police newly established and highly contested forms of private property - with farmers accused of either gene or seed piracy as GM crops are blown by wind onto their land.

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