MARION LAVAL-JEANTET and BENOIT MANGIN

Laval-Jeantet and Mangin — known as the collective Art Oriente Objet — play with the boundaries between species.

May the Horse Live in Me, 2011
In this performance piece, Mangin injects Laval-Jeantet with horse-blood plasma. To prevent an allergic reaction to the foreign fluid, Laval-Jeanet prepared her body through a series of small-dose injections of horse immunoglobulin. Laval-Jeantet also dressed for the occasion in horse-hoof stilts.

Laval-Jeantet describes the experience of her trans-species blood transfusion: “I had the feeling of being extra-human. I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hyper-sensitive, hyper-nervous, and very diffident, the emotionalism of an herbivore.”1

Artists’ Skin Culture, 1996
Laval-Jeantet and Mangin combine their skin cells with those of a pig to grow small sheets of skin that they then tattoo with images of endangered species. “These trans-species totems are ultimately and ideally grafted onto compliant art collectors, who can then make these art bodies literally part of their own.”2

Artists's Skin Culture

See Art Oriente Objet’s website.

1 Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science is Redefining Contemporary Art (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2014), 224.
2 Sk-interfaces exhibit

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