Dana-Fiona Armour: MC1R Project

Dana-Fiona Armour operates in a world in which forms invent themselves in veritable mutagenic agents, transforming each other, and modifying the organisation of the spaces that they occupy, provoking in us a feeling of unsettled strangeness. The “MC1R Project” was conceived during the artist’s residency at “Cellectis”, a clinical-stage biotechnology company. The collaboration has resulted in the design of a hybrid plant, both human and plant, a Nicotiana Benthamiana (a species highly susceptible to viruses frequently used in research, including the Covid 19 vaccine) that now carries the MC1R gene, a human gene involved in skin tone, skin colour, freckle development and red hair, all characteristics that describe the artist’s physical appearance. In the basement rooms of the Collection Lambert, the presence of this new type of organism in a new series of installations, sculptures and videos offers the promise of an unprecedented journey beyond the boundaries of the human and the plant, where the meeting of the two elements calls for new narratives, new ways of looking at a sensitive environment that has become heterogeneous – irreparably so.