Wombs looks at my own female body, whose leaky materiality is entwined with environmental relations by the gesture of taking hormonal contraceptives. Slugs are hermaphroditic allies in the exploration of inner and outer ecologies of fleshy desire. In the installation, a custom-made extra-bodily organ hosts two cell cultures in a hybrid ecosystem. My own vaginal epithelial cells and slug egg cell share growth medium, communicate chemically through it, and stage a dance of the two organisms at a cellular level.

In the hybrid ecosystem of the installation, the two cell types display a radically different behaviour: my own cells divide and small fragments of extra-bodily tissue become visible with naked eye. Slug cells, instead, do not divide: they are alive, but remain suspended. The growth medium is infused with human sex hormones and affects the primordial biochemical communication between cells. How would it be different if gastropod hormones were at play?

Wombs investigates the body as a biochemical cyborg: hormonal contraceptives modulate human sexual organs to prevent pregnancy, thus accompanying my own sexuality. Moreover, they inscribe my own experience into a biopolitical sphere, for, once released into the ecosystem through urine, they may trigger the endocrine system of other organisms. The work asks how they might affect hermaphroditic slugs, and wonders how slugs sexual behaviour might affect human bodies. By so doing, the piece prompts a critical re-thinking of the discourses on contraception and sexuality as a female-only, human-only experience enclosed in one’s own body.