The desire to experience the feeling, in part, of being a member of another species, was the genesis behind the art project Que Le Cheval Vive En Moi (May The Horse Live In Me) by Art Oriente Objet (Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoit Mangin).
In the project, the artist explores how it feels to hybridize the human body with that of a horse by injecting immunoglobulin into her body from various horses over the course of several months and by creating prosthetic horse legs. Usually, the human body would recognise the animal blood plasma as foreign and the human immune system would attack it, so it is not clear how long the horse blood plasma would survive in the body and/or how much (if any) of the horse plasma would affect the human nervous system.
“I had the feeling of being extra-human, I was not in my usual body. I was hyper-powerful, hypersensitive, hyper-nervous and very diffident. The emotionalism of an herbivore. I could not sleep. I probably felt a bit like a horse,” explains the artist of her transformation.
However, does this project help bridge the gap between humans and animals? Does it work to reduce speciesism or does it reduce the horse to a tool, an object for the artist to explore her own fascination/fixation with the equine experience?
May The Horse Live In Me is part of the exhibit Second Lives: Jeux masqués et autres Je continuing until September 11, 2011 at the Casino Luxembourg.
Visit: http://artorienteobjet.free.fr/
Via DesignBoom
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