Altered found photographs and feathers, presented as a slide carousel of variations.
2021
From close enough, bodies are chimeric. I am made
of membranes that can be crossed
of collectiveness of lives lived together
of viruses that are not consider alive yet impact as
macroscopic giants stepping through the planet.
Viruses are the ordered outcome of chaos, someone
once told me.
As influenza viruses pass
from birds to pigs to horses to birds to bats to pigs to bats to horses to human:
The cellular membrane is where I dream to be a bird.
A virus connects, dwelling in bodies of different species.
Am I a community if we share inhabitants?
There is comfort and danger in sameness.
I am made of the memories of who came before me.
I am made of past & future contaminations.
How many of my ancestors were microbes?
How many of them contributed to the stories my genes narrate?
How many of my great grandmothers were birds?
She died in 1920 of childbirth, my grandfather.
She died in 1920 of childbirth and Spanish Flu.
She is in a mass grave of 1918 influenza victims.
She is forgotten: I don't know her name, or her face.
I require chimeric ancestry.