A Breeding Ground for Uncertainties

Today, H told us about last night’s dream: went to a swimming pool with a snowman, and the snowman disappeared. Of course, in the midst of such a tremendous heatwave, what figurations do we dream of, reflecting the shifts in our environment that disrupt our most mundane structurations? What modes of being do we yearn for, do we need, can we continue to rehearse, to weather this turmoil and remain together ?

Amid the waves of blockage, hypersensitivity and exhaustion from which I speak, let me unveil the process behind this writing. Ona first sent me her materials (performance scripts, conference presentations, grant applications and links to her website). I spent several days engaging with these materials in a rather strange way—sometimes pretending I was encountering them for the first time, without Ona beside me; other times, imagining that Ona understood my intentions even though I had none yet; and at times, pleading with her to help me sift through the overwhelming mass of fragments she had compiled into a document that would be utterly impractical for anyone who appreciates a well-spun narrative. I then spent a while, a few more days, staring at these fragments, finding myself captivated at every turn, but deep down, unable to shape anything coherent from them beyond a sense of profound admiration and resonance. Finally, last minute on the penultimate day, I highlighted certain fragments in bold and arranged them into three broad sections that made sense to me at the time, which I titled “Life and Death of Metaphors”, “Enby Propagation” and “Cross-Change”. I thought that a fitting title for a piece on Ona’s work for the Hangar Collection could be “A Breeding Ground for Uncertainty”.

Ona Bros often does just that: she embodies the unknown. She rolls her tongue, as she knows others cannot, to enflesh that mark of differentiation¹. She assumes the standard posture of the shot that on other occasions she has captured to weave the distance between one side and the other of the pornographic device². She traverses the territory, deferredly inhabiting , a trans-border passage that shaped the life of someone as random and as fundamental as her ancestor³. Thus, what follows is nothing more than an exercise in tuning in and writing/mirroring, placed very intimately alongside Ona, her voice, her studio, her roots of inquiry and her images (both material or enunciated); I sometimes reproduce it verbatim, at times in confident distortion.

Life and Death of Metaphors

With the sense logistics of what we do on a daily basis, Ona Bros’ work is a testing ground. The metaphorical is logistical, and the logistical is absolutely political. What gets transported, from where to where; who is involved in the process, and who is systematically excluded. How do meanings get shifted, through what means, and on what world formations as a baseline. How long these channels of meaning have been open for, how much longer they will remain so, and why such opening is so long or so short. The study—and at times participation—on the displacement of masses of meaning for aesthetic-political purposes is, I believe, one of the most fundamental operations at the core of Ona Bros’ recent projects. Hence, Ona dedicates herself to this process with intuitive and almost serendipitous care, yet with exceptional rigour, exploring how technosciences have bridged worlds (through analogical transport, creating metaphors that are never innocent, never neutral).

Chimeras have been reclaiming umbilical circular time.
Fed up with the unilinear descending and patercentric inheritance, narrated by the poetics of struggle, of the dominant and the recessive, so eugenetic, based on the deterministic and essentialist machinic imaginary of DNA as the first and last truth of the individual.
Fictions that shield a certain type of heterocentric kinship and the mother institution.
Narratives used to justify the extractivism of certain bodies in the global economy of assisted reproduction, such as the buying and selling of eggs or surrogacy.
New narratives that twist the discourse are urgently needed.⁴

A research-art praxis that crafts tropes, deviations from common sense, assumptions, and taboos, calling upon those who resonate with the vibrations of a “social nerve dense with imaginaries that unfold reactively at the slightest touch”⁵. Here, Ona delves into the micrologistics of certain taboos. When she encounters them, she tests their boundaries, seeking to shift their terms and conditions.

Reflecting on A Horse is not a Metaphor, her 2008 piece, Barbara Hammer remarked, “‘Survivor’ has never seemed to me to be the right word for a person who lives with cancer. I would choose a word that signifies flourishing, a sense of well-being, exaltation and love of life. The horse is not a metaphor, but a living, breathing creature of power and pride that I join with in moment-by-moment living”.⁶

Continuing this active commitment to choosing languages that resonate more deeply with our capacity and displacing semantic fields whichflatten and limit vital force, Ona Bros vernacularises and re-locates the greats of experimental feminist visual arts and feminist technosciences, on her own terms. There are other ways to tell these stories:

The genetic counter-lmap
The cancellation of sub-cellular hierarchies
The anarchist assembly of bioentes
The circularity of umbilical times
Reproductive communality
Chimerical genealogies⁷

Transferring bundles of meaning (living units or sets that semiotically shape the way we live) might actually accompany those same bundles to their end. It could be seen as palliative rhetoric, or perhaps a way to stage questions that challenge the figurative meanings tied to a world that fails to embody the solidarity and vibrant liberation we seek. Death to this metaphor. Next.

Enby Propagation

We are familiar with techniques like grafting, cutting, layering and sprouting. These are naturocultural linking methods that are always in tension, often pushing the boundaries of what can be named. These are ways of propagating life, fostering shared mutation, cultivating unexpected varieties of interdependent modes of existence, and nurturing non-categorised, non-rigid and dynamic connections. These techniques are familiar to us, to Ona and myself. They introduce us to unexpected forms of bonding by other means. Unexpected forms of kinship, of nurturing, of non-binary mothering when desires align. Propagation of shared, eventually enby (NB)⁸ life. Co-parenting through the uncertainties of humanness. And that also means embracing and becoming entirely-spontaneousweeds, like the cugula⁹ that grows in the ditches of patriarchal and productivity-focused enclosures.

Ona’s work calls for the “end of individualized genetic property”. I join this riot against reproductive Modernity, unifyier in relational universals; and we loop back to Sophie Lewis: “At what point does queer pose no challenge to property? To what end are we queering motherhood?”¹⁰

A Breeding Ground for Uncertainties serves as the most compelling figuration I can think of for navigating patriarchal-colonial contemporaneity. It captures the emphasis of this norm in tension with the thick web of inter-dependencies that surround it, teeming with contradictions and deeply entrenched injustices.

“World-making” differs fundamentally from creating processes for a regenerative justice. One approach assumes a capacity to start anew, often based on a misguided notion of tabula rasa, continuing to tap into the blueprint of the modern project to some extent. Against the backdrop of the flatness of genetics, for example, the praxis of art–research for a regenerative justice in which Ona Bros participates is committed to restoring and partially repairing while working with what is already there. This approach fosters the generation of relational and supportivetissues, which work as emergent, epigenetic and to a large degree unanticipated alliances.

In opposition to the essentialism and biological determinism of racial, anthropocentric, and ableist capitalism, enby propagation seeks to flourish transcending the liberal humanist concept of the filial¹¹, which positions individual subjecthood as the core of identity and desire.

Ona thus experiences and expresses the collapse of this essentialist regime both against and from within: “with your foot you collapsed the pillars on which the modern world was founded: the autonomous being, the hierarchy of presences, the excuses for plunder”.¹²

Enby parenting is familiar to us, the regeneration of simple yet non-repetitive nor nostalgic worlds. We are familiar with boycotting the assumption of forms of reproduction grounded in the industrial fiction of verisimilitude and the erasures of dependencies it implies. We are familiar with assisted reproduction in non-technosolutionist terms: reproductive processes are always assisted, because which reproduction is not assisted?¹³. As Sarah Franklin notes “..reproductive technologies that assisted conception technologies (…), are reproducing much more than children per se.”¹⁴ And we echo Sara Lafuente’s question “What does assisted reproduction reproduce?” What culture does it participate in and create?¹⁵

We are familiar with a collective political subjectivity if it is more-than-human, more-than-nuclear, but also more-than-familial and certainly more-than-pessimistic, as M. Murphy’s notion implies¹⁶. Despite multilateral and multimodal collapse, we can continue to invent frameworks for regeneration and enby reproduction that resistant to rampant TERF anti-utopianism.

New narratives are urgently needed; we owe it to the children of ice and to the adults who grow up with them.

This will require us to call on the communities.
So let us call on the non-genetic uterine lineages,
extra-uterine milk lineages,
chimerical neighbourhood kinship,
home-born monsters,
Equidnas of the socio-technical complex of the now.¹⁷

Cross-Change

Freezing and thawing are relational processes that Ona Bros chooses to pay attention to the intersections of time and temperature, both in cultural imaginaries and practices and in geopolitical and social arrangements.

Ice and materialities linked to low temperatures are at present symbolically unstable, flickering.
Thermal re-significations that shift the categories of life/death.¹⁸

The radically unstable ontology of ice as an elemental materiality leads to studies and experiments in the techno-scientific realm of cryopreservation for maintenance and memory (sperm banks, assisted human reproduction clinics, global food logistics) and is particularly relevant in the context of climate change and global warming.¹⁹

Aligned with her work in BetaBlastoCuir, which explores the estrangement of gestation and parenting processes, Ona’s CRYO line of operations continue to engage with transformative forces that whisper to her from the minuscule. She addresses evidence and signs that offer tools and counterarguments to the Western, bourgeois, heterocentric, able-bodied, white episteme of “because I can do whatever I want”. CRYO involves establishing an art-research practice that acknowledges not just doing as one desires but what one can, working with whatever (or whoever) is available, willing and ready for it. This is a generously elastic form of solidarity, which Ona has helped me understand and which I have thought of often since, also in activism: we do politics more with those we can, rather than with those we might prefer to do it with. And this transformation is essential for staying attuned to the complex world in which we are becoming. In this way, the logic of absolute and all-encompassing desire is suspended (or melted; take your pick of metaphors) through a creative and generative link with whichever conditioning agents that provoke constant daily affective and relational transformation. To put it another way: in CRYO, Ona operates once again not so much from unconditional love, but from a dynamic love attentive to the limits and desires (desires/needs, according to Amaia Pérez Orozco²⁰) of constellations and chains of care that extend beyond the narrow confines that tie together the “I” and “you” in the “now” or “tomorrow”.

In freezing and thawing processes, past and future converge. Maintenance and preservation meet with transforming forces, negotiating the most suitable forms of permanence (if any), in situ.

States of latent life or incomplete death.
Destabilising the binomial boundaries imposed between what must be preserved and what must be avoided at all costs.
This approach ties into certain feminist perspectives and diverse cosmovisions where the territories between the living and the dead are densely inhabited.²¹

Change happens across (dis)icing, as a turbulence at the heart of liberal infernos²². Whether it happens gradually or abruptly, depending on the specific context, a world order is in the midst of renegotiation. The connection to the struggles for ceasefire among ice communities, or that between communities of the forest and those of the laboratories are what summon these elastic, resilient solidarities to engage in politics and aesthetics that remain uncertain in their details, yet their agitation triggers the configuration of what binds us and we desire/need, breeding uncertainties and always operating within-and-against the blackmails of turbo-capitalism, family memories, the sex-gender matrix or the private nuclear household.

1. BetaBlastoQueer (Ona Bros, 2021) http://ona-bros.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Ona-Bros-BetaBnastoCuir-Nogueras-Blanchard-1024×683.jpg
2. Cum Shot (Ona Bros, 2016) http://ona-bros.net/projectes/cum-shot/
3. Camp a través (Ona Bros, 2013) http://ona-bros.net/projectes/campatraves/
4. Ona Bros, Fragmento de las quimeras. Performance BetaBlastoCuir (MACBA 2022)
5. Lecture read by Ona Bros at the conference “Las Madres No”. University of Vitoria, 2024.
6. A Horse is not a Metaphor (Barbara Hammer, 2008) https://barbarahammer.com/films/a-horse-is-not-a-metaphor/ (traducción propia)
7. Ona Bros, Fragmento de las quimeras. Performance BetaBlastoCuir (MACBA 2022)
8. “Enby” is the phonetic display of the typographic contraction “nb”, which stands for “non-binary”.
9. In Spanish, cugula is a vernacular term for avena fatua, the common wild oat. It is considered a “weed”, and there are places where when a baby was born with a vulva it was said that they had “salido cugula” (been born a weed). Given this history, because of the way it sounds and its capacity to rally people, Ona and I think it’s a wonderful surname under which we can continue inventing queer and trans*feminist relational formats
10. Sophie Lewis, Abolir la familia. Un manifiesto por los cuidados y la liberación (Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation). Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2023, p. 50.
11. Tiffany Lethabo King, “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family.” Theory & Event 21, no. 1 (2018): 68-87.
12. Ona Bros, “Diario del embrión”. Material de BetaBlastoCuir (2021)
13. Bruna Álvarez, Receptoras de óvulos en el contexto español: trayectorias, conflictos e imaginarios (2023). https://open.spotify.com/episode/0unf66ca0a8Hy2OHCHRyTy
14. Sarah Franklin, Sarah, Biological Relatives-IVF, Stem Cells and the Future of Kindship, Carolina del Norte, Duke University Press, 2013, p.226
15. Lafuente Funes, Sara, Mercados Reproductivos: crisis, deseo y desigualdad, Navarra, Katakrak, 2021, p.50.
16. M Murphy, oral statement published by Radio Web Macba, SON[I]A #403 https://rwm.macba.cat/es/podcasts/sonia-403/
17. Ona Bros, Fragmento de las quimeras. Performance BetaBlastoCuir (MACBA 2022)
18. Ona Bros, CRYO (2024) http://ona-bros.net/projectes/cryo/
19. Sara Lafuente, Ona Bros’ interlocutor, together with other researchers, participates in a research framework under the title Cryosocieties: Suspended Life: Exploring Cryopreservation Practices in Contemporary Societies. https://cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de/
20. I have heard this term from Amaia orally, but her extensive work on the contemporary conditions of care is developed at length in her book Feminist subversion of the economy. Contributions to a debate on the capital-life conflict. Traficantes de sueños, 2019.
21. Ona Bros, CRYO (2024) http://ona-bros.net/projectes/cryo/
22. Ian Alan Paul, Liberal Infernos, Ill Will, 2024.