Pedro Neves Marques: Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed
In Linnaeus and the Terminator Seed (2017), Neves Marques asks if there is a deterministic, evolutionary line connecting modern botany to the contemporary transgenics. Gathering botanical drawings by European naturalists in Latin America and Southeast Asia, plant genome representations, contracts and UN documents about transgenic seeds, as well as modern depictions of the reproductive systems of flowers and humans, this short film-essay explores the sexual imaginary of botanists such as Carl Linnaeus to consider the post-natural conditions governing current biotechnology, the colonial management of reproduction, as well the representation and indexation of life forms past and present.
On view: 3 – 5 Apr 2020
Pedro Neves Marques (b. 1986, Lisbon) is an artist and writer whose films range from fictional dramas to essays and exploratory video and documentary reporting that address ecology, resource extraction, and the politics and practices that govern our competing images of nature, technology and gender. Across his visual and literary work, Neves Marques has explored the libidinal economies that preside over the governance of life (of bodies, of affects) across species boundaries, including genetically modified organisms (GMO), market growth models and industrial agriculture, and the history of colonialism to untangle the ways in which these systems produce particular temporalities and ways of being in time.