Theca is a “cyborg” sculpture, a hybrid living installation that exists through the coexistence of separate entities, their maintenance through the interaction and the sharing of information between analog and digital, organic and inorganic matter, living and non-living entities.

Theca. The function of the invisible is the result of multidisciplinary research on the diatom micro-algae that the artist-designer Fara Peluso has been developing for years, focusing on their ecology and the importance of their invisible existence for the maintenance of biodiversity and the life of many species, including the human beings.

The project, supported and developed in 2022 in collaboration with PhD Giulia Ghedini, the leader of the Functional Ecology Group from the Gulbenkian Science Institute Oeiras, and Cultivamos Cultura Lisbon, is a post-human and eco-feminist artistic practice that shows how humans have always been bonded with these organisms, questioning why and when the social constructions defined human species as a separate and autonomous entity (Lynn Margulis). Peluso wants to give her work a cyborg identity because, through the philosophical work of Donna J. Haraway about human-machine and human-animal relations, she shares the idea that “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organisms, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” (Donna J. Haraway).

The Theca installation proposes a new way of observing the environment by focusing on microscale organisms and their relationships with other living entities. The work questions how humans can change their “mental models” by observing symbiotic relationships and coexistences in Nature and aiming to redesign their hierarchical social constructions. Symbiotic interaction, microscales, and coexistence relationships are the keywords that Theca proposes to research in order to participate in changing the way we perceive the world instead of perpetuating the desire to change it.