Sculpture
Anonymous
XXth century
Québec, Canada
Wood and wool
Collection: Musée de la civilisation, Québec, Canada
1992-602

This stylish otter looks rather human. A real metissage of human and animal, this folk sculpture is only a fantasy, a caricature. But there is something unsettling about this charming otter-woman. She is a reminder of the new cross-species genetic technologies and our concerns about just how far they will go.

Source of Sound Tracks :

Robert Lepage / Commentaries 1 and 5
Theatre director, conceptual artist, set designer, film director
Extracts from an interview produced by Ex Machina
Producer: David Clermont-Béïque
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Marc-André Sirard / Commentaries 2, 3, and 4
DMV, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Animal Sciences,
Laval University
Recording produced at the Musée de la civilisation, Québec

The animist prophecy is coming true through the progress of medicine. Shamans, sorcerers, and the elders have always known that humans are animals and animals are human. The bison is our brother, the bear is our mother. People can be pig-headed or bull-headed, have a ponytail, a lion’s heart, crows’ feet, chicken flesh, a face like a monkey, the memory of an elephant, a hangdog look, a viper’s tongue, cats’ eyes, crocodile tears, and be hungry as a wolf. Everything alive wants to live, living is the lifeblood of everything alive. And I’d rather see with an eagle eye than bury my head in the sand like an ostrich.

 
Metissage – species

Until now the human-animal hybrid was a figure of the imagination. The crossing of humans with other species is now within our grasp.

New technologies are appearing that explore the cross-breeding of species. We are trying to transplant animal organs into humans. We are introducing human genes into living animals. We sometimes use pig’s liver to detoxify human blood outside the body. We are looking at the possibility of a sow gestating a human foetus.

Xenografting is transplanting organs and tissue from one species to another. Apparently a pig’s heart is the closest in shape and size to a human heart.

Transgenesis allows the introduction of a foreign gene into a person’s gene line. For example if a human being receives the heart of a pig, a preliminary transgenesis reduces the risk of rejection.


Commentary #1 (Robert Lepage)
Researchers at an American plastic and reconstructive surgery clinic have been working on a new technique with albino mice. They biopsy the mice in order to harvest organic tissue. Then they isolate cells from this tissue and seed them on a polymer mold which is shaped like a human ear. When the cells have fused into the shape of an ear, they’re implanted on the mouse’s back in order to grow new living tissue. Once researchers determine how far these tissues will generate, we’ll be able to do the same thing with humans. The possibilities are mind-boggling and touch the unexplored corridors of human consciousness.

Commentary #2 (Marc-André Sirard)
It is now possible to think about using organs from animals to replace human organs in patients. The animal that is the closest to man in terms of general physiology is the monkey but the pig is not very far either. The pig, as the human, is an omnivore, which means that it can eat the same food as us. With a few genetic modifications, we can foresee the use of pig organs as the liver, kidneys or the heart within the next 10 years. To allow the organ to be accepted and not rejected we must hide the pig antigens at the cell surface.

Commentary #3 (Marc-André Sirard)
To modify an animal for producing compatible organs, we must act very early in the embryonic life. In the first few hours after the sperm penetration in the egg we can microinject a few copies of a human gene in the first cell hoping that one or 2 will get integrated in the animal genome. Then the embryo will develop and all cells will contain the new gene even if we can organize it to be expressed only in liver cells for example. The cells that will express the human gene will become more invisible to our immune system and then won’t be rejected

Commentary #4 (Marc-André Sirard)
Now that we can clone pigs, we can anticipate some technological advances leading to the production of human organs into animals. We can imagine taking cells from a patient and reprogramming these cells in a way that they become only liver cells for example. Then these cells are fused with pig embryos genetically devoid of liver cells. At birth, the young piglet will have a liver genetically identical to the donor and won’t be rejected. These new possibilities raise even more ethical issues that will have to be addressed before this technology is put to the test.

Commentary #5 (Robert Lepage)
Recently, in a hospital in northern Germany, they tried to determine the weight of the soul at the moment that it leaves the body, by placing electronic scales under the beds of patients who were dying. If you believe the results of the study, an average soul would weigh a little under 50 grams. This is the amount of weight that the body loses at the precise moment that the heart stops beating. If the soul is located inside the heart, what happens with a transplant where the donor is an animal and the recipient is human?

The word “soul” has been associated with what some people call “identity”. In every culture and in every society, the idea of metissage is always perceived as the opposite of purity, the fear of losing one’s soul, of debasing it or denaturing it through contact or combination with the Other.