Marta de Menezes is a Portugese artist working in research laboratories demonstrating that new biological technologies can be used as new art medium. Founded Ectopia in 2007, an experimental laboratory and artist residency housed at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência in Oeiras, Portugal. The program fosters collaboration and discussion between the Institute’s scientists and participating artists.

Works

• Nature?: created live butterflies with wing patterns never seen before in nature. Achieved by interfering with the normal developmental mechanisms of the butterflies using tools such as microsurgical needs, red-hot cauterizing needs and tools for micrografting.

  

• Functional Portraits: Imaging of the brain using functional MRI to capture a portrait of the model performing a task that characterizes herself or himself. Image »

• nucleArt: Using DNA labelled with fluorochromes to paint the nuclei of live human cells. Image »

• Decon: Reproductions of Piet Mondrian’s geometric paintings were created on bacterial support medium. The colors from those paintings are then progressively degraded by bacteria.

  

• Proteic Portrait: MARTAISAVELSWVRALRIVEIRDEMENESESDASILVAGRACA is the translation of the artist’s long name to a sequence of amino-acids that form the mArta protein. Image »

• Nuclear Family: Intends to represent, using DNA microarrays, genetic differences from human beings from different groups. These groups can be defined based on physical characteristics, such as “dark eyes”, “blond hair”, “handicapped”; Or non-physical characteristics, such as nationality, religion, “vegetarian”, “hunter” or “wealthy”.

  It will be unavoidable to conclude that there are no significant genetic differences between individuals from different groups. And that, a priori, each human being has the same capabilities as any other one.

Interview Excerpts

• What interests you most about working with biotechnologies? …we are now living in a time where a lot of our metaphors are of scientific and even biological origin. We use expressions like “it’s genetic” without really knowing what it means. We, humans, are facing lots of challenges from our actions and their consequences for our planet, for our health, for our lives in general, and being knowledgeable about biology seems to be the best bet to find solutions.

• I find myself, and the audience as well, struggling with the concept of natural

• I see art as one of the most important areas of our culture. As such, it does not have a frivolous role as many people like to believe. Nature? is not decorative art. It does not exist just to be seen and for viewers to apathetically state “how interesting.” It is to be thought about with a critical mind, and also to be made available to anybody, ANYBODY (not just art critics or culturally rich individuals). Its ethical challenges are to be engaging, and provocative, not passive and dismissive!