What methods will be used to maintain industrialised lives while feeding our biological need to connect with the natural world? What does a future where all our interactions with the non-human are fabricated look like? How compelling can these fabricated experiences of connection with the natural be? How can we create sustainable symbiotic improvements for our future? Who will have access to real nature? Who will have to endure these lab-made supplements? How can we reshape our current relationships with the natural to improve mutual health? 

Project Description:

We bring you to the future. Here, due to over-industrialisation, only the most privileged have access to natural spaces. The rest of us are left only with false interactions with the natural implanted within our bodies through lab-made parasites. 

The Parasitical Child is a speculative exploration of more-than-human and human relations and symbiotic nutrition. It asks that those who interact with the project contemplate and create space for the healing potential that nurturing relationships between non-humans and humans hold. Furthermore, it questions our attempts to connect with the natural artificially. The project uses satire to bring forward questions about how we navigate the non-human, asking us to reevaluate our attempts to co-inhabit with the more-than-human world. Placing anti-solutionist strategies at its core, The Parasitical Child welcomes the relinquishment of rational thought and the birth of parasitical reflection. Ultimately it aims to bring forward contemplation, not only on our personal lives but on the institutional and societal relationships that we hold with the more-than-human world. 

The Parasitical Child kit explores healing through layers. It looks at the body, trauma, and illness by understanding shared histories, human and non-human. A history that exists within/through one’s body. It investigates how trauma influences us and the organisms existing within us. We call forward memories that allow connections with the past and incentive questions about our inhabitance in ourselves. Highlighting how this mutual nurturing between us and the organisms that live in our bodies is chaotic and complicated, The Parasitical Child proposes healing as a learning process – a journey of self-exploration, a way of understanding to feel safe within this body full of parasites. 

The Parasitical Child is a reaction to the damaging effects of industrialisation, over-sanitation, and humans’ distancing from nature. It exists through the ongoing research that proves the relationship between contact with nature and improved health (mental, physical, spiritual). The project speculates on a future where those who do not have access to the natural must harvest and ingest lab-grown helminths (parasitic worms) to receive the health benefits they are missing. 

The helminths are presented in a kit that contains the necessary tools to maintain and consume the parasites. The kit allows one to nurture themselves through nurturing the parasitic worms. It proposes healing and survival through mutual care. An asexual experience of motherhood, where one nurturing practice reflects how they will be nurtured back. It focuses on the need to bring back interactions with parasites that have existed for most of our history.