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
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