18 Oct Charlotte Jarvis
EMAP Artist
In residence at Ars Electronica (AU)
In Posse – A mission to make ‘female’ semen
Throughout history, the sperm has been venerated as a magical substance, a literal and symbolic totem of power. The In Posse project aims to write again this cultural tale, to use art and science to perturb the patriarchy in a collaborative way making sperm from “female” cells. The project is developed in three parts. First, In Posse start doing a trip to produce spermatozoon (sperm cells) from Charlotte Jarvis body, in collaboration with the teacher Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes. At the same time, a female form of seminal plasma (the liquid part of sperm) is developed from material given by women, trans and non-binary persons. Lastly, the female sperm is used in a series of reconstitutions of the ancient Greek celebration, the Thesmophoria, reserved for women.
Charlotte Jarvis
Charlotte Jarvis works in the intersection of art and science. She recorded music on DNA, has seen her heart beats outside her body and make currently the first “female sperm” in the world. She is currently a lecturer at the Royal College of Art.
Patricia Saragüeta has a degree and a doctorate in chemistry. She is a researcher at the CONICET and teaches in the physiology and molecular and cellular biology department in the school of exact and natural sciences of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Interested by genomics, she works at the confluence of art and science, in her work as at the institutional level.
The teacher Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes has a doctorate of the University of Utrecht (Hubrecht Institute). For the last five years, her group in the medical centre of the University of Leiden has concentrated on the study of the development trajectories of organs and human tissue, in particular the urogenital system.
The Chuva group is one of the first to combine the single-celled transcriptomics with the human exome sequencing.