Sketches for a Cephalopod Ontogeny

2022 -
Digital prints, Text

Whose body horrify and who does it horrify?

Extrapolating the somatic politics embedded in tropes of body horror onto the flesh of cephalopods, Studies for Proposing a Cephalopod Ontogeny begins with a speculative scenario of what would happen should an octopus find herself unwillingly transformed into a human. Framed as a methodology for (re)defining the limits and vernaculars of human episteme, relationality, and value-creation, this work examines the different possibilities of making human perception legible to radically different sensorial apparatuses and intelligences.

Aiming to imagine new ways of expanding our collective lexicons for non-human and more-than-human subjectivities, this project proposes a new path to achieve a more sensitive form of co-existence within a collapsing world. In the era of anthropogenic shifts on a planetary scale, nothing could be scarier than becoming human—not vice versa.