Photo: Aram Boghosian
the mothers
2020-2022
"The Mothers" is a speculative transcorporal video installation activating SCOBYs as material and metaphor and non-human protagonists. The work examines the ongoing production and reproduction of the related fictions of settler colonial gender binary and white supremacy. The scoby began growing in April 2020. The Mothers is a sci-fi post-apocalyptic story about a group of refugee queers who begin a post-capitalist world, one defined by an ethics of care and interdependence, not extraction. The story explores the abject, queer futurity and the symbiotic overlap of the microbes and humans. The video uses chroma key green, like a green fluorescent protein genetic marker, as an index of the invisible to foreground structural inequities.
The Mothers was initially staged in Boston 2021 at Fountain Street Gallery and later at Emerson Contemporary Art Gallery in 2022. The gallery installation scene invites viewers to become performers, implicated participants in the story. This story we are all in.
MATERIALS: video monitors, SCOBYs, kombucha, glass vessels, nail polish painted oxygen tubes, spandex, custom wallpaper, table/chairs.
Costume Prop Materials: trucker hat, dishwashing gloves, white jumpsuit, augmented reality face filters, gold body paint.
Mask materials: bra, string, fabric, hot glue, thread. Other materials in video: hand-drawn animation, SCOBYs, kombucha, aerobics gifs, memes, Hot Dog AR gif, Central Park Karen footage, biocellular footage, laundry machines, toppling of Columbus statue, etc.
Mise-en-byme materials: plastic bubble with red and blue plastic pole vein like supports built in a basement, a fake aerobics costume made from reassembled XL orange sweatshirt, large gym mirror.
the story
“The Mothers” is a sci-fi post-apocalyptic story set far into the future of May 2020 about a group of refugee queers who take over an abandoned brutalist office building in what used to be South Boston. They begin a new post capitalist world, one defined by play and care and art, not extraction. They called themselves Homo Trans-Ludens or Homos for short. They were the new Homo Ludens. The previous renters, Homo Faber, had died decades earlier in a fatal late-capitalist crash.
Time functioned differently here—ecstatic, not static. One primary source of wonder they found was clear sacs that would swell periodically with primordial fluid. After 7 days, entities called SCOBYs (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) would form, fermentingly. The Homos called these skins “The Mothers.”
The Mothers were formless and formful, both interdependent and independent, unsightly in their oozing tentacular ambiguity, squishy parts vulnerably splayed for all to see, spandexically vibrant in all their they's and she’s and he’s and zie’s.
Anti-perfect. Anti-industrial.
Like a bacterial wabi-sabi, when ready, the Mothers emerge from their sacs and sift and slither over the surface of the city, regenerating and repairing the destroyed earth around them. A time of care begins.
BIOMIMICRY, post-humanism AND SPECULATIVE FICTION
coming soon….