In 2003 multi-media Piccinni transformed the Australian pavillon at the Venice Biennale into a home environment for her sculptural life forms:


Patricia Piccinni, We Are Family, 2003, Venice Biennale

Mutant life forms: half human being, half dog. The result of runaway medical science? A genetic version of a nightmarish Frankenstein horror.

Not quite. The work raises questions about the nature of human beings and families in a biotech world that we now live in.

We need to accept, and make sense of mutant life forms created through the intertwining of nature and history through genetic engineering.

Biotech indicates the difficulty of continuing to subordinate difference to identity (the same or similar). We always used to think of difference in relation to what was the same (species). But with biotech mutancy we have to think difference as difference not deformed being or monster.

That is one dynamic. Another is the effect of global warming, which is also caused by human activity. The warming of the earth's atmosphere will result in a masssive reduction of life. Will new mutant forms arise? They have in the past.

A the moment it is the biotech industry and the scientific research labs that are creating the different life forms through cloning. Do we have the conceptual tools to make sense of these different life forms?

Does the idea of Cyborg do the job for the new forms produced by human cloning? Or has biotech left that behind?

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