Mutupo
2021
Mutupo [totem, Shona] is is our ongoing project drawing on an open-source dataset of DNA sequences of the gut microbiomes of Tanzanian Hadzabe community members, to critically reflect on the infrastructures and power dynamics that seek ownership of the living world.
The research for Mutupo begins with an open-source database of the metagenomic profiles of 350 individuals from the Hadzabe, a nomadic indigenous community of foragers living in the Lake Eyasi region of Tanzania, East Africa, the cradle of humankind. The dataset generated by a study titled “Seasonal Cycling in the Gut Microbiome of the Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania” at Stanford has already instigated multiple cultural trends in the West, including the “palaeolithic diet”. This is owing in part to the fact that the study shows the most diverse metagenomic profiles of any sample group existing today and significant seasonal variation.
With a backdrop of fad diets, and associated dubious research ethics, this dataset asks us to carefully consider the representation of biological big-data. As biotechnology continues to facilitate bioprospecting and biological surveillance, Dorothy Nelkin’s words ring more true than ever: “Biological explanations do political work, creating the rules for belonging and exclusion.”
Owing to the proliferation of genome sequencing technologies, metagenomics is emerging as a tool to mine our environments for DNA that may one day be used to produce medicines, resurrect extinct species and even alter human behaviour. This biological big-data is poised to usher in a new era of scientific research and industrial exploitation, the benefits of which will be competed for by private and public interests. Our future relationship with Nature will be determined by who claims ownership of the living world and the infrastructures they assemble to mediate it. Beyond opaque datasets, and the means of gathering them, Mutupo asks what other tools we can create to develop new ways to imagine our proximity and relationship to the living world.
Our latest intervention under the project’s framework happened in response to the invitation by Studio Other Spaces to nominate more-than-human stakeholders from anywhere in the world to be represented in the Future Assembly exhibition at Biennale Architettura 2021. Our contribution was an algorithm-generated totem representing so called dark matter: organisms known to us only through metagenomic sequencing and yet to be characterised under scientific convention.
In collaboration with Adam Heslop, we developed an algorithm that translates the prevalence of microbial dark matter found in the microbiome samples of the Hadzabe community, into a multi-dimensional totemic form. The algorithm’s behaviour is inspired by regional cultural practices of totemising the living world through stone sculpture, and also draws on geographical data that contextualises the landscapes of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania.
With this alternative to the dominant technoscientific representations of biological data, we present a critique on biological surveillance and its infrastructures, and the extractive relationships it enforces between humans, othered humans, and more-than-human agents. Yet, the totem is also an ode to the possibility that a living world held in a global commons could nurture new forms of representation and, therefore, how we can build reciprocal and more ritualised connections with Nature.
Project Credits
Creative Direction: Faber Futures
Developer: Adam Heslop
Fabrication: Simon Sawyer
Sculpture casting: Bronze Age Foundry
Photography: Toby Coulson