In conjunction with the last weekend of Lucy Beech’s Warm Decembers KUNSTVEREIN GARTENHAUS presents a screening of recent works by Beech exploring the connections between waste, creativity and the body. The screening includes the video essay Freemartin (2021) first performed as a lecture at Salt Istanbul and developed out of an experimental writing project with historian of science Tamar Novick. Freemartin explores different temporalities of reproductive management in the context of animal breeding and historical and contemporary flows of biological waste between the farm and the scientific laboratory. Beech will also screen Reproductive Exile (2018); a film which explores urine as a resource materials for biomedical pharmaceuticals and follows the experience of a cross-border patient and consumer in the commercial surrogacy industry.
Freemartin (2021)
HD video, 28 min
stereo sound
The video explores various attempts to define the freemartin phenomenon, a form of intersexuality that arises in genetically female cows born in twin pregnancy where a reciprocal exchange of blood and hormones influences the development of the female twins’ reproductive organs, often rendering the animal sterile. In the context of the industrial farm where animal life is organised around reproductive efficiency Freemartin’s are often regarded as waste due to the cow’s incapacity to lactate. The film traces instances where farmers and scientists collaborated on ways to salvage value from the animal’s otherwise waste body transforming the freemartin into a model organism for understanding human sexual development. The work explores how scientific attempts to harness the freemartin’s disruptive animality built the foundations of modern embryology, fueled a revolution in immunology, and streamlined agricultural breeding. Drawing on Beech and Novick research the film characterises the path through which the freemartin was naturalised as a research subject often with the intention to underscore culturally dominant ideas about gender and sexuality and reinforce normative values at human, bodily, and social scales.
Reproductive Exile (2018)
4K video, 30 min
5.1 surround sound
The film treats themes of breeding, bioclinical labour, “host” procreation and hormonal multispecies pharmaceutical relationships. It tracks the experience of a cross-border consumer in the commercial surrogacy industry. We encounter this “reproductive exile” on the road, in her car, obsessed with a machine called ‘Eve’ — a three-dimensional representation of the human female reproductive system — who she confides in while swabbing, driving, and injecting herself in a seemingly endless loop. Occupying an uncomfortable space between reality and fiction the film slips between a road m ovie and film essay, linking research on the cultural social and economic agendas of the assisted reproduction industry with the experience of the films disoriented protagonist deciphering scientific information and becoming increasingly aware of the conflation of her body and those that facilitate it. As she discovers more about her body’s incapacity to produce the hormones she needs she confides in Eve about the drugs she injects daily, derived in some cases from pregnant horse urine and in others from concentrated urine of menopausal women. The film is built from interviews with intended parents, surrogacy brokers marketing material and commentary on transnational bio-social community forums where self-organisation strategies are shared and discussed.
Warm Decembers (2022)
4K video, 28 min
5.1 surround sound
Warm Decembers reimagines a poetic verse novel written by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1950 – 2009), which took nine years to complete, and was described as recording a“crisis in writing”. Borrowing and experimenting with the poem’s discordant flows the film is a constant interplay between language, music and imagery, where representations of boundaries between states of being are constantly collapsing. At the end of the poem Sedgwick originally included her notes, which she was unable to integrate, but unwilling to dispose of. By publishing her discarded fragments Sedgwick preserves her poetical remains as waste; serving up the leftovers of the poem’s construction and advertising the revisions and erasures that have made it. Taking these notes as an invitation for artistic interpretation the film explores the ways in which bodies, identities and creative works survive their own destruction.
Lucy Beech
Lucy Beech (b.UK, lives and works in Berlin, DE) is an artist filmmaker whose practice revolves around collaboration and encompasses roles such as directing, editing, choreography, research and writing. Forthcoming/recent exhibitions of their work include Kunstinstitute Melly NL, Edith-Ruß-Haus für Medienkunst, Oldenburg, Harburger Bahnhof, Kunsthalle, Mainz DE, Tramway Glasgow, De La warr Pavilion and The Liverpool Biennial UK. With their collaborator Edward Thomasson they have presented work at Tate Britain UK, South London Gallery, Maureen Paley London UK, The Barbican Theatre UK, The Camden Arts Center UK. Beech is currently guest professor at The Film University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf and recently completed a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.
