Keywords: hormones, video, art
Root Picker, tells stories of plants who became entangled in neocolonial expeditions during the 1950s, in the midst of what is referred to as the “golden age” of steroid chemistry. At the time, the world was ignited with desire for scientific promises of life extension, heightened sexual prowess, the elimination of queer, transgender, and intersex people (who were/are seen by hegemonic powers as polluting mutations), the maintenance of colonized populations through the application of birth control, and promises of steroid enhanced soldiers. The U.S. government in collaboration with transnational pharmaceutical corporations, initiated expeditions to other colonial territories in search of the most abundant botanical source of steroid hormones.
Narration, performed by Gabriella Cordoba Vivas toys with the authority and objectivity implicit in the voice of the nature documentarian, while transing assumptions of human omnipotence by centering the agency of the yams and their refusals to perform for the scientists who stole them. The yams are celebrated as queer ancestors who teach us the power of refusal, and show us the queerness of “sex hormones” whose seemingly obvious social powers become slippery and unbound in the revelation of their production within and movement between plant, fungal, and other than human people. The narration unwinds into trans feelings and swampy desire.
Growing out of works exhibited in the virtual show Molecular Female (2020), Root Picker was commissioned for Difference Machines, a group exhibition at the Albright Knox Museum from Oct 2021 to January 2022. In the gallery space, an assemblage of scientific industrial equipment was installed on a low platform below the video. A tower housing a bio-controller computer unit was attached to the glass chambers of a bioreactor and nutrient media reservoirs. The biocontroller monitored and adjusted the internal environment of the bioreactor chamber, which incubated clusters of swamp fungi (Cunninghamella elegans) fermenting wild yam steroid extracts. The swamp fungi, whose filamentous tangles grew cloud-like forms, absorbed the steroid molecules from the wild yam extract that they grew in. Through the course of the show, they enzymatically transformed these yam steroids into “human sex hormones,” like progesterone and testosterone, within the gallery space.
About the Artist
Rian Ciela Hammond is an artist whose work weaves queer ecology, feminist science and technology studies, social practice, and synthetic biology. Their transdisciplinary practice manifests installations, writings, and workshops, often aimed at unsettling binary constructions of gender, human/non-human, and synthetic/natural: persistent ideological technologies of coloniality. Recent works have turned towards wetlands as spaces of abundance, refuge, and queer belonging: storytelling with these multiplicitous beings at the indeterminable edges between land, water, and sky, between life and death.
Their artworks have been exhibited at The Beall Center for Art + Technology in Los Angeles CA, Gray Area in San Francisco CA, The Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo NY, Bioart Society’s SOLU space in Helsinki Finland, and Hangar in Barcelona Spain. Their writings can be found in a volume on artificial intelligence titled Chimeras: Inventory of Synthetic Cognition (Onassis Foundation 2022), Culture Push’s online publication PUSH/PULL: Trans Family Archive, and Art as We Don’t Know It (Aalto University Press 2020). They have an MFA from State University of New York at Buffalo, and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Hammond is based in the Weelaunee watershed in Cherokee and Muscogee territory currently known as Atlanta, GA.
Citation
Hammond, Rian Ciela. 2024. “Root Picker.” TSQ*Now, Transgender Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4. http://www.tsqnow.online/post/root-picker
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