"We are now in the era of post genetic revolution. The cloning technologies and gene mapping that once shocked are now commonplace, silently and often invisibly integrating themselves into the everyday. It is in such a climate that we would like to re-stimulate the debate and re-frame the question of how these are affecting us, and how we can express this through art."
Tomas Lundberg, Curator & Organiser, Today in Paradise - Genetics & Art
After exhibiting the transgenic cactus (The Cactus Project, 2001), we became increasingly aware of their absence of ‘belonging’ in the world. Would their final resting place be confined to the laboratory or was there a place for these plants among nature? And what do we mean by nature, contamination and wilderness? These ideas transformed the project from processes of genetics to one of belonging and in so became the final resting place for the project and two of the cacti. They were finally released in The Mexico Project.
One was transplanted with its large ‘family’ of cacti in the north, Desierto Sonorese, and the other amidst its transgenic ‘cousins’ (domesticated plants genetically contaminated by both intervention of man and promiscuity of plants) in the south, Oaxaca. Their journey into Mexico is documented and recorded through a book and video footage.