Stamping Genes is a collaborative mobile lab and speculative biohacking experiment developed by Nathalie Dubois Calero and Kristin Lucas. The project invites audience participation in exploring species hybridization as a creative response to environmental challenges facing local ecosystems in and around Ljubljana and Koper, Slovenia.
Grounded in scientific research on horizontal gene transfer and paragenetic expression, where genetic material moves between organisms outside of traditional inheritance, the lab offers an embodied, symbolic experience of microbial merging. Participants wear safe, agar-based microbiota patches on their skin that represent the hybridization of two local species selected in relation to local ecological conditions. Through this act of hosting, participants are invited to reflect on ideas of consent, agency, resistance, and co-evolution.
The project’s Do-It-With-Others (DIWO) approach removes institutional and high-tech barriers to create an accessible space for speculative inquiry. Rather than seeking fixed outcomes, Stamping Genes prioritizes curiosity, ecological awareness, and embodied reflection, offering participants a shared experience of adaptation, care, and transformation in a time of shifting boundaries.
Kristin Lucas is an artist exploring connectivity as both an interpersonal process and a condition of the digital age—shaped by technological and ecological forces alike. Through speculative, often collaborative works—spanning biohacking, solar-powered web projects, and AR installations—she embraces complexity, challenging dominant narratives that shape how we see ourselves, relate to one another, and the more-than-human agents with whom we co-create realities. Lucas’s work has been featured in Art in America, Engadget, and Hyperallergic, with commissions from institutions including Dia Center for the Arts, FACT Liverpool, Rhizome.org, and the Whitney Museum. She is represented by And/Or Gallery in Pasadena and Electronic Arts Intermix in New York. Lucas studied at The Cooper Union and Stanford University, and currently teaches in the art department at the University of Texas at Austin.
Nathalie Dubois Calero is a BacterVirHuman, scientist (Ph.D. in biology, UPMC, France) and bioartist (BA, University Concordia, Montreal, MFA, University of Windsor, Canada, MAres student, Ionian University, Corfu). BacterHuman is a series of feminist/queer works that explore human-microbe relationships inside the human holobiont through workshops, performances, ontological workshop games, and videos/sounds (aka Bacterhuman in Bandcamp) using fabric and tattoos made with pH indicator culture media, where color changes testify conflicts, overlapping multiplication or equilibrium between human skin (and its excretions), and microbiota- creating images and sounds interacting with her performative quest of human identity. She collaborates on MaterVirus, an ontological workshop game about human viral identity with Cecilia Vilca, Waterbodies with Ada Gogova, and Stamping Genes with Kristin Lucas. Her website is at nathalieduboiscalero.com
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