Practical Futurology
By Alejandra Labastida

Charlotte Jarvis has a productive relationship with science, with which she has allied herself to materially develop her inquisitions into the limits of the body. Or rather, into the limits of certain discourses imposed upon the body while ideology is smuggled in under the cover of scientific arguments, as the feminist philosophy of science has denounced ever since its beginnings. In Posse: Female “Semen” and Other Acts of Resistance forms part of a trilogy that uses stem cell and genetic engineering technology. With the pictorial background that constantly resurfaces in her work, Jarvis has found in stem cells—cells that can potentially be induced to become any type of cell in the body—an equivalent to the ultimate primary color.

The first piece in the trilogy is Ergo Sum (2012-2013), conceived as a self-portrait: it involves a physical copy of the artist made out of stem cells transformed into neurons, cardiomyocytes and blood cells, genetically identical to Jarvis’s. The second, Et in Arcadia Ego (2014-2015), is Jarvis’s interpretation of the 17th Century painting by Poussin with which it shares a title. The painting depicts an idyllic Tuscan landscape in which a group of shepherds inspect a legend on a tomb that reads “Even in Arcadia, there am I,” in reference to death. In Jarvis’s installation, the landscape is the waiting room of a hospital, a capturing the process by her healthy cells transform into cancer cells in a laboratory.

In her student years, Jarvis reacted to what she considered to be a deeply misogynistic reading of art history with a performance piece in which she created a Pollock-style action painting made with paint splashed on the canvas with a strap-on dildo. Fifteen years later, she has taken on the mission of producing her own semen using her stem cells in collaboration with Dr. Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes. The complicated process of making semen begins by trying to erase or deactivate one of the Xs (the female genetic marker) from Jarvis’s stem cells through accelerated mutation, scanning and selection; a healthy colony of these cells that have changed their sex is then cultivated in order to generate cells capable of producing sperm, like those found in the testicles.

Jarvis’s work is materialized in installations, videos and performances; in Sala10, we are presenting a video that combines two tracks. The first consists of the performance of a talk or manifesto on the artistic, scientific, ethical and affective aspects of the project, while the second is a visual essay that alternates home movies of Jarvis’s baby with laboratory scenes, microscopic videography, aquatic landscapes and shots taken at dusk, in which the artist’s nude, pregnant body makes ritualistic gestures. There are also blurred images of ejaculation, superimposed over scenes of collective ritual.

This third piece also has a Latin title: In Posse, which means in potential, literally before birth. Even though the trilogy bears the title Corpus, it seems to me that In Posse better sums up the drive behind these works. The color that Jarvis found in stem cell technology is potential made living matter. Engaging in projects in posse, still not executable due to legal, ethical or technological limitations, is perhaps an everyday act in the art world, but this has other implications in the scientific world. It is this condition that allows Jarvis to frame her collaboration with Dr. Lopes as a form of technological, biological and creative activism and, above all, as a feminist act.

Because of its role as a bastion of masculinity, the possibility of creating female semen means rewriting the cultural narrative on gender and undermining patriarchal power and hierarchy. In Jarvis’s lusty words: “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY.” But that has nothing to do with the success or efficacy of the experiment, nor with the millions of euros invested in grants and infrastructure. In any case, this research can have a variety of therapeutic applications in terms of resolving the problem of male infertility.

Jarvis interrupts patriarchal logic through the mere fact of suggesting a world where a group of women who generate their own semen. Producing female semen becomes a speech act when it operates within a piece of performative research that, independently of the practical results, brings into existence that which it desires through the simple act of looking for it. As she envisioned, this is a collaborative scientific transubstantiation that occurs in the process, in specific moments and decisions, such as that of creating the seminal plasma not only with her own blood, but that of a diverse group of women and trans and non-binary people, and doing so through a ritual that undermines the concept of the individual creator. At play is Jarvis’s intention to inscribe a narrative that is not just scientific, but also historic, naming these rituals “Thesmophoria” after the ancient Greek festival. The machismo of Hellenic culture prevented records from being made of this festival, which was exclusively for women. Here, a political and artistic decision has been made for the reinvented Thesmophoria to likewise have nearly nonexistent documentation.

Let us put aside the references in Jarvis’s work to art history. Perhaps this project falls into line with the importance that feminist science fiction and Afrofuturism have taken on for activist practices that aim to conjure new worlds. The reinvention of reproduction, care work and gender is the core premise of a large part of feminist science fiction: a vegetarian, pacifistic future in which men are no more, women reproduce by parthenogenesis and there is no nuclear family, with girls being collectively raised, as in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland (1915). Or Ursula K. Le Guin’s visions of genetic experiments carried out on extraterrestrial worlds, in which there are 16 women for every man, women marry each other and men are “sheltered from education for their own good” and exclusively devoted to meeting the reproductive and erotic needs of women (The Matter of Seggri, 1994), or in which reproduction is indistinctly assumed by asexual, hermaphroditic humans who define their sex as they go into heat (The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969). These are just a few examples from a long list that we could trace all the way back to Mary Shelley’s foundational Frankenstein (1818). One of Jarvis’s major insights is to understand that these speech acts offer an outlook that is queer, radical and optimistic (as one of the episodes of the video is titled), and which are better served in our times if we follow the premise of Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto (1985): that of embracing science and technology as part of the feminist struggle.

Beyond invoking a mythical matriarchal identity to do away with the need for men, Jarvis aims to show us a biological reality that is not just potential, but right before us, in our cells, hidden under those thick layers of fog with which cultural narratives have enveloped our bodies. If we move to the quantum scale and closely examine how our bodies work, not only does the possibility of defining one’s gender escape us, but also that of recognizing individuals with fixed, stable boundaries. These, too, are a constructed perception: we are bodies in constant flux along with other living agencies. Jarvis believes that accepting our hybrid, mutable nature will have profound existential repercussions.

In the end, the great question that Jarvis asks, after becoming a mother, is why it continues to be necessary to carry out a complex investigation into such an issue as the one she presents to us, when, in our daily lives, we either experience or accompany the queerest, most radical process of transformation a body can undergo: pregnancy. In Maggie Nelson’s words: “How can an experience so profoundly strange and wild and transformative also symbolize or enact the ultimate conformity?”[1] As long as the economic, social and cultural structures that make this question possible remain standing, works like Jarvis’s will continue to be necessary, beyond any immediate ends, to allow us to say together: FUCK THE PATRIARCHY!!!
 
[1] Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2015, pp. 13- 14.