Sub Rosa.

"SubRosa is a collective of artists who identify themselves as "a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the effects of the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies on women’s bodies, lives, and work." Several of their performances bring to light the biofictions inherent in assisted reproductive technologies.

U-Gen-A-Chix: Cultures of Eugenics, staged as part of the YOUgenics exhibition in 2003, was one such participatory performance. These titles already announce the kind of biofiction at the core of assisted reproductive technologies, pointing to the intimate connection between this bioscience and eugenics and the status of woman as a breeder. Of course, the female body and the issue of motherhood have been a subject of contestation for some time now. However, subRosa identifies nascent problems arising from developments in this bioscience, specifically linking human-assisted reproductive technologies to the genetic engineering of chickens, pharming, cloning, and eugenic breeding.

The pamphlet, distributed to the participants of the performance, U-Gen-A-Chix: Cultures of Eugenics, posed the provocative question: “Why are women like chickens?! So that the participants of the performance might uncover the biofictions inherent in reproductive technologies and establish their positions in this regard, SubRosa set up two performance booths, one that provided information on human egg donations and the consequences of reducing the female to the status of a breeder of designer babies."
http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=en/no/03/stranger-than-ficiton-by-ernestine-daub...… (mer)