“My Film is For the Pigs”: Heather Dewey-Hagborg on Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera

Heather Dewey-Hagborg is on a mission to confront the uncomfortable future, especially when it comes to emerging tech. Stranger Visions features portrait sculptures crafted from analyses of genetic material the transdisciplinary artist, educator and filmmaker literally picked up in public places (one person’s discarded cigarette butt is another’s way into a stranger’s DNA). T3511, a collaboration with cinematographer Toshiaki Ozawa (Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog), sees an anonymous saliva sample become fodder for the alchemizing of the perfect romantic partner. Now there’s Hybrid: an Interspecies Opera, perhaps Dewey-Hagborg’s most ambitious work to date. Opening at NYC’s Fridman Gallery on November 1, the multimedia project includes a short documentary/personal narrative set to an original score alongside a set of (robotically-constructed and clay-fired) “memorial pig sculptures,” which allude to the xenotransplantation topic at hand as well as the question of whether genetically engineering bovine for the sole purpose of harvesting hearts for human transplantation is the ethical easy call Big Tech would like us to make (and believe). Just prior to the artwork’s New York debut, Filmmaker reached out to Dewey-Hagborg to learn more about “enmeshing the scientific and the personal” to shape a career in “biopolitical art.”

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.