May your eyes never look away, may your genitals always be lubricated (pixels, porn, power and the panda desire economy)
This project delves into the eco-surveillance regimes tending to captive pandas and their reproduction. It traces the practices of production/circulation of their images, the physical regimen and genetic management, as ways of governing the sexual desires of this vulnerable specie. By hoarding the images and objects involved in those circuits, I investigate how different sites of knowledge production such as scientific research facilities, porn industries, nationalism, and popular media operate to create situated knowledge about the pandas' vulnerable bodies. This project also calls into question the variability of panda sexual desires and the resistance strategies and bodily knowledge they harness to counteract these regimes of control.
On the first level, this research is about pandas, and the lengths humans go to propagate them, manage their desires and render them irresistible to our eyes. The second layer explores the multitude and will of images (of pandas) and the strange connections they create as well as their network of production, distribution and secondary circulation. The third level is an exploration of fluidity in the various forms it takes within this project, whether in bodily fluids of the controlled (sperm, piss, blood, vaginal secretion, sweat), the pixels that carry human and non-human desires (the porn they watch, the one we make for them) and flows of capital (trade offer: you get= a couple of fertile pandas for ten years, you give= a dual-use technology, preferably uranium).
This project exists as a performance lecture and publication.
