Cosima Herter & Marta de Menezes
I Can't Live Without You
I Can’t Live Without You is a large-scale, living sculpture installation born inside of a story from a science fiction thriller Herter wrote in 2019. From a distance, the installation appears to be a life size sculpture of a naked, adult female form in a glass aquarium. She is hollow, made of plastic, nearly transparent, and seems eerily delicate. She stands with her arms raised above her head with her fingers spread as though touching a spectacle in front of her lifted eyes that we cannot see. Her body is poised in mid-strain as she reaches upwards. As the viewer moves closer, it’s apparent that she is not alone. Her partner is revealed on the texture of her surface: Pestalotiopsis microspora (P. microspora). Over the next several weeks, the fungus will, literally, eat the sculpture. Colonizing her body, consuming her being, and ultimately dying of starvation once she is completely gone.
Marta de Menezes
Marta de Menezes has been exploring the possibilities modern biology offers to artists. Developing the use of biology and biotechnology as a field of research to develop and learn new techniques to operate and manipulate new art media, conducting her practice in research laboratories that uses as her art studio. As a consequence, Menezes’ art research activities have been directly linked to research on the intersection of art and science and, specifically, responding to the rising awareness of society about the developments in science and technology.
Cosima Herter
Cosima does not identify as an artist, per se. She is a storyteller who creates intangible tales that can be brought to form through staged productions. Marta is a bio-artist: using living matter as her medium, she creates material objects that can be held, smelled, touched, felt and viscerally experienced as a physical substance.
Together, we are a team collaborating and combining our stories to construct something that is fully beyond the sum of its parts. I Can’t Live Without You is birthed from the dialogue between artist, storyteller, ancient species, and modern technology. This is a relationship. All art is a relationship. In our case, not only between storyteller and artist, but with the organism that literally gives it life.