Charlotte Jarvis & Patricia Saragüeta

Charlotte Jarvis

Charlotte Jarvis works between art and science. She has recorded music onto DNA, seen her heart beat outside of her body and grown her own tumor. Charlotte’s work explores the future of reproduction and the body as a liminal space – a site for transformation, hybridisation and magic. Charlotte is currently engaged in making “female” sperm with scientists in Leiden, a “collaborative uterus” with a team in Argentina and an artificial embryo model “parented” by an artificial intelligence in Denmark. Charlotte has exhibited her work in twelve international solo shows and over one hundred group exhibitions. She currently lectures at The Royal College of Art in London.

Patricia Saragüeta

Dr. Patricia Saragüeta has a degree and PhD in Chemistry. She is a CONICET Researcher and Professor at the Department of Physiology and Molecular and Cellular Biology, School of Exact and Natural Sciences, UBA. She is a scientist and artist, interested in genomics, cellular and molecular biology. She works for the meeting of art and science both in her work and at the institutional level. She has published three books of poetry, several articles and many essays.

Artworks

Organ of Radical Care: Una Matriz Colaborativa

2022-

mixed media

Organ of Radical Care: Una Matriz Colaborativa is an ongoing collaborative project using new science to grow a collaborative uterus from the menstrual blood of multiple women, trans and non-binary people, in which a fertilized egg could grow.

The chalice on display houses a cell colony, consisting of endometrial cells derived from multiple anonymous donors. The team have successfully grown endometrial organoids (‘mini-wombs’) in the lab, and the next stage of the project is to gain ethical approval to use menstrual blood from a group of 13 Argentinian activists who have volunteered to be the project donors.

The donors recite together a poem written for the project. Video works depict these donors, the scientific process, Patricia’s laboratory, cell samples and also document Charlotte and Patricia bringing some of the samples to Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia—the literal end of the world—which stands here as a symbolic “portal” to the desired future.
The project aims to be what Donna Haraway describes as “split and contradictory”; to generate “rational conversations and fantastic imaginings that change history.”