Wombs
“The project Wombs looks at my own female body, whose leaky materiality and fleshy becoming confront myself with fears, desires, and negotiation regarding sexuality and pregnancy.
The artwork comprises a series of organ-like laboratory glassware hosting enclosed ecosystems: a bacterial culture produces flesh-like microbial biofilm in an environment polluted by hormones metabolites and residues extracted from my own urine.
Wombs explores the absence of maternity as a physical and political experience. The possibility of pregnancy is part of my everyday experience through simple gestures, such as taking oral contraceptives and gynaecological controls. These gestures accompany my own sexuality, as well as the desires and fears behind it. Moreover, these gestures inscribe my experience into a biopolitical sphere, for, once released into the ecosystem through urine, hormonal contraceptives can become pollutant. By doing so, the project prompts a critical re-thinking of the discourses on pregnancy and contraception as a female-only, human-only experience enclosed in one’s own body.”
With a visceral fascination for organic processes, Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher investigating leakiness and transformation of biological and technological matter. Her practice employs a unique constellation of visual works, performances, collections of plant and animal relics, workshops, and collaborations with bacterial cultures. Based between Berlin and Helsinki, Pevere is PhD candidate (Artistic Research) at Aalto University, Helsinki. She is founder member of the Berlin advocacy group AG21c and member of the Finnish Bioart Society. Most recent exhibitions include ArtSci Salon | Emergent Form, the Fields Institute, Toronto (CA); Non-human agents, Art Laboratory Berlin.