BIO

Vanessa Lorenzo is a researcher and trans-disciplinary designer based in Switzerland. Trained as product design engineer and media designer, she focuses on objects that address intimate interdependencies between humans and the ecologies we are embedded in. Influenced by ethno-fiction, feminist theory and speculative design methology, she creates scenarios embedding people, the more-than-human and the technologies that interweave them in order to enable odd sympathies and post-anthropocentric futures.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

_Mari Mutare_

_Mari Mutare_ is a proposal about interspecies affections and nature cultures in times of ecological and biotechnological transition. From a xenofeminist regard to biohacking practices, this project is inspired by the remarkable persistence of the figure of the Green Man, a foliate head carved into many European churches and present in different temples of cult around the planet. The ornament of the foliate head acknowledges a pagan worship of the natural world highlighting the human-nature dualism, and our own vulnerability face to_ vegetal-otherness._ During the residency, the aim is to conceive a human-biocompatible prosthetic that hosts plant cells in order to perform the “ungreening of man”, a deconstruction process of the symbol that embodies a hybrid character that transcends the boundaries beyond categories, species and genre.