The latest version of Performing Diagnostics is a one day performance installation that will take place on Sunday February 1st at Articule in Montreal. Press information with details for time and place will be release next week.
Performing Diagnostics:
Take a dash of donkey antibody. Mix with monkey secondary antibody. Add antigen taken from a genetically modified lab mouse. Stir gently with a plastic spoon found in the garbage dump. Take needle tips unearthed from landfill located near the incineration waste facility and carefully dissolve them in a beaker of bleach. Put both mixtures in a petri dish made from egg shells to see the enzyme reaction to determine a diagnosis. Is it positive or negative?
This performance installation re-imagines biotech protocols for diagnostic testing in relation to waste. Here, high-tech bio-surveillance lab equipment meets low-tech DIY recycling and craft; glossy sterile lab materials meet contaminated garbage. In Performing Diagnostics the art gallery is amplified as a vector for processing biological waste and pathogens created by its human-animal visitors.
Gallery visitors are invited to perform the protocols for ELISA (Enzyme-Linked ImmunoSorbent Assay) – a scientific protocol with medical applications to test for the presence of HIV and breast cancer – with garbage collected from recycling bins in Montreal. The re-use of garbage in biomedical and biotech practices proposes a DIY ethos, where anyone could potentially create an HIV testing kit from found objects, and complicates the segregation of purity from waste in the methodology of testing for ‘diseases’. Visitors are further invited to collectively perform the sterilization and waste disposal of all materials generated during the performance. Ultimately, the contamination of viral, bacterial, cellular, molecular, environmental bodies is contemplated as a potentially productive relation, albeit, entirely unscientific!
performing diagnosis
