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28 abril, 2025 In Archive, Art, Bioart, Denmark, Installation, Live Streaming, Performance, Radio, Soundart, Transcripts

Live Streamings from Dolmens: DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

Marcello Mercado

Live Streamings from Dolmens, 2011

DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

Flintinge, Denmark — 19/06/11 14:17 PM

Live Streamings from Dolmens unfolds as a quiet yet potent act of temporal entanglement. Beneath the ancient stones of Flintinge—dolmens whose origins drift somewhere between archaeology and speculation—the artist instigates a dialogue between the molecular traces of human evolution and the enduring architectures of prehistory.

Fragments of the human genome, translated into sound, drift through the heavy air beneath the capstones, inhabiting the same acoustic cavities that may once have sheltered the dead. The sonification of DNA collapses boundaries between symbol and matter: what is usually confined to the microscopic becomes vibrational, inhabiting the body of the listener, the body of the earth, and the massive stone thresholds of the dolmens themselves.

Rather than presenting the dolmens as inert relics, the work reactivates them as transmitters—live, vibrating sites that absorb and refract an ephemeral sonic flow. The installation escapes traditional notions of the archive; it does not merely preserve, but reanimates. Memory here is neither linear nor fixed; it unfolds across shifting materialities, weaving genomic remnants and megalithic architectures into a shared, unstable temporality.

The choice of live streaming—the insistence on the present tense—infuses the work with an immediacy that resists the stasis often associated with historical monuments. Each broadcast is a fleeting, irreversible encounter, underscoring the precariousness of both biological and cultural continuity. The genome itself, an archive of survival and mutation, is no longer silent but rendered audible, insisting on its presence through sonic textures that evade easy recognition.

The performance-installation constructs a landscape where informational residues become aesthetic material. Sound is not employed here as a representation of life, but as a direct extension of it—a mutable field where code, stone, air, and consciousness converge. It suggests a media archaeology that does not privilege technological linearity but embraces dispersed, contingent histories—histories that oscillate between the organic and the constructed, between deep time and the volatile present.

In this terrain, the dolmens cease to be merely objects of contemplation; they become agents within a living system of transmission, modulating the genome’s silent speech into vibrations felt as much as heard. The body of the listener, the ancient stones, and the coded remnants of human life form a single, extended organism: an ephemeral, networked being that pulses across space and time.

Ultimately, Live Streamings from Dolmens proposes an ecology of existence where the molecular, the monumental, and the ephemeral are co-constitutive. It gestures toward a reconfiguration of how we understand archives, rituals, and communications—favoring a model not of permanence, but of transmission, resonance, and becoming.

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DNA-performance-installation- soundart

(LIVE) 19/06/11 14:17 PM

Place: Flintinge, Denmark

Dolmen 2: 54° 44´23.99″ N 11° 47´23.36″ E

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28 abril, 2025 In 3D scanners, Archive, Art, Artist´s book, Bioart, Drawings, Exhibitions, Genome, Installation, Media, Music, paintings, Performance, Photography, Print, Publications, softart, Soundart, Videoart, Wien

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

THE DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA GROUP

The transdisciplinary DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA GROUP consists of project leaders Katharina Gsöllpointner (media theoretician), Ruth Schnell (artist), Romana Schuler (art historian) and artists Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. During the research process invited artists and scientists will participate as special guests in the context of certain topics and/or project phases.

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, 2016

2-channel video installation, artist’s book, public audio interaction, sound installation

1. Concept

In Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, data becomes matter, and matter becomes music. This expansive project unfolds as a tactile, audible, and visual archive, preserving fragments of life at a moment when biodiversity itself is vanishing. Thousands of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes—echoes of evolutionary memory—are mined, transformed into sound, and materialized into 3D-printed notations. Each printed form, each vibration, each surface invites the audience into a synesthetic crossing where touch, sight, hearing, and proprioception merge into a new language of the senses.

Rather than offering a closed composition, the work proposes an open, living structure, where technology and error, archive and entropy, sound and object are woven into an evolving fabric. The operatic form is no longer bound to vocality; instead, it extends into nonhuman agencies, enlisting the genetic residues of fungi, insects, mammals, and bacteria as unexpected co-authors. The traditional roles of composer and performer dissolve into a collective interaction between human bodies, machines, and biological matter.

Through a meticulous process of data mining and translation, genetic sequences are read, converted into audio, shaped into three-dimensional sculptures, and inserted into a book-object that redefines what a musical score can be. Here, musical notation is not drawn but grown—imperfect, fragmented, vibrating with the material noise of its own genesis. The haptic surfaces printed in biodegradable plastic invite direct engagement: rubbing the sculptures with piezoelectric microphones generates new sounds, transforming the audience into performers who extend the life of the archive with each touch.

In this sensorial ecology, seeing, touching, and hearing no longer operate as separate modalities but fuse into an expanded field of perception. The project inhabits the unstable zone between representation and performativity, where the archive is not preserved in stasis but activated through ephemeral acts of encounter. Glitches, printing errors, and incomplete forms are embraced as part of the work’s inner logic, mirroring the chaotic processes of mutation and decay that shape life itself.

Rather than offering stability, the opera proposes a shifting, porous system in which bodies, data, and artifacts intertwine. It is an invitation to rethink archives as dynamic ecosystems—mutable, tactile, and deeply entangled with the temporalities of both human and nonhuman lives. The speculative impulse at the core of the work gestures toward possible futures where preservation, memory, and creativity no longer obey linear or anthropocentric logics.

In Genomic Opera, the score is not merely to be read or interpreted; it must be felt, handled, listened to with the skin. The opera resists closure, insisting on the incomplete, the unstable, the open-ended. It is less a memorial to loss than a rehearsal for resilience—a sensorium in which the residues of life continue to mutate, resonate, and proliferate.

2. Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION, AUDIO, PROPRIOCEPTION

In Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century, the senses are not merely pathways but forces of transformation. Touch summons sound, vision unfolds into tactile reliefs, hearing manifests as sculptural vibration. Genomic fragments—encoded in ancient, volatile alphabets of A, T, G, and C—spill beyond the limits of the readable, becoming textures, waves, and invisible resonances that the body can only partially grasp.

Each 3D-printed notation is a fossil of movement, a topography of sonic intensities frozen in plastic, waiting to be awakened by contact. Under the friction of fingertips, they whisper, crackle, and hum, offering secret frequencies to those willing to touch with intention. Listening becomes an act of caress; sight a dance over the uneven geographies of sound.

What was once hidden in molecular depths is rendered into surfaces, thresholds where biological memory, technological error, and human gesture converge. The printed forms refuse purity: glitches, collapses, and deformations are not failures but traces of a process where sensing and thinking intertwine. The body itself becomes a hybrid interface, vibrating with an archive that is no longer silent.

Proprioception—the silent sense of spatial embodiment—guides the interaction, as hands navigate invisible maps encoded in plastic veins. Here, the tactile is not an accessory to the visual but its twin; the audible is not an extension of the image but its counterpoint. The book-opera offers no clear front or back, no singular voice or score, but a labyrinth where music is materialized and material becomes musical.

In this expanded sensorium, data ceases to be abstract. It sinks into the skin, resonates in the bones, flickers behind the eyes. Each page of the opera becomes a threshold: between life and its representation, between archive and metamorphosis, between noise and meaning. The genomic residues, shaped by countless generations of life, now inhabit the fragile, unstable territory of human touch—ephemeral, porous, alive.

Steps:

Recollection of multiple genomic sequences prokaryotic and eukaryotic

A Text to Speech software will read the multiple genomic sequences

Transformation from TEXT to AUDIO FILES (Aprox. 10 hours audio)

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

Through algorithms the audio files will be transformed in 3D objects

Transformation from AUDIO to 3D OBJECTS

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

The 3D objects will be printed with a 3D Printer.

Transformation from 3D OBJECTS to multiple 3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION

The 3D printed objects will be pasted on music pentagram pages as

musical notations of a Partiture-Book

3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS + 3D OBJECT (TOUCH)

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION

The 3D printed objects will be rubbed with 2 piezoelectric microphones

in order to generate new audio files.

Transformation from 3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS to AUDIO. PUBLIC

INTERACTION

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION, AUDIO

Sounds recollections by a H4N microphone

The new audio files will be collected by a SYNCHRONATOR device that

will enables to visualize the sounds.

Transformation from AUDIO to IMAGE.

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

Sounds as VIDEO

Transformation from AUDIO to VIDEO

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

3. VIDEO

PASSPORT VIMEO: 1663

Within Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, the public becomes an active agent in the generation of new sensory experiences. Equipped with handheld dynamic microphones, visitors are invited to drag or rub the microphones across the tactile 3D-printed genomic notations. As the microphone picks up the minute surface textures, it translates these physical gestures into bursts of electronic noise. These sounds, inherently glitchy and irregular, are immediately processed and visually transformed into color fields projected onto the gallery wall. Thus, the act of touch is synesthetically extended into the auditory and visual domains, creating a dynamic and ever-changing chromatic landscape generated by the audience’s own explorations.

Rather than simply observing, visitors sculpt ephemeral sound-images, becoming co-authors of a live, evolving opera of genomic noise. In this multisensory choreography, the genetic fragments materialize simultaneously as sound, color, and gesture, emphasizing an entangled relationship between body, data, and environment.

4. Bestiarium der Gedanken des 21. Jahrhunderts

Synästhetische, genetische Oper in 4 Akten

Die Musik ist vom Herrn Genmeister Marcello Mercado

2015

Personen:

Genbanker 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 und 8 ……………………Basssänger

Protein_id ……………………………………………………..Sopran

Adenylyltransferase ………………………………………..Sopran

Gene_desc …………………………………………………….Sopran

Eukaryotischen Genoms ………………………………….Basssänger

Prokaryotischen Genoms ………………………………..Tenöre

Bacillus subtilis aldolase ………………………………….Tenöre

Ribosomale RNA, tRNA und andere RNA …………….Countertenöre

Die Besetzung der Rollen ist nach Mercados thematischem Verzeichnis:

Prokaryotischen Genoms ………………..Sgre. Genbanker 1 und Sgra. Blast 2

Eukaryotischen Genoms …………………Sgre. Genbanker 2 und Sgre. Gebanker 3

Ribosomale RNA, tRNA und andere RNA …..Sgre. Genbanker 4, 5, 6, 7,und 8

Protein_id……………………………………………….Sigra. Proteasa und Sigra. Locus

Gene_desc …………………………………………….Sigra. Alkaline Phosphatase

Bacillus subtilis aldolase ………………………….Sgre. Bacillusmandini

Adenylyltransferase ……………Sigra. ADP-heptose synthase von Cyclohydrolase

Inhalt:

Ouvertüre

Akt 1:

Chor Locus 7267896

Terzett Locus 326123

Duett Locus 424371

Chor Locus 037232

Arie Locus 70076

Akt 2:

3D Recitative und Arie

Duett (Idyll aconitate hydrase)

Chor (Prokaryotische Chor)

Marsch (Erlöschen!!!)

Sextett (Flammen!!! Salve Regina!!!)

Akt 3:

Bacillus Schmerz: Racheduett

3D Fanfare: Oh Plastik!

Protein_id Klage

Monolog der Gene_desc

Ribosomale RNA Todesmotiv

Akt 4:

Melodie der Abfälle

3D Drück Siegeshymne

Freiheits – Duett

Lactobacillus Menuett

Tragisches Schicksalsmotiv

Wahnsinnsszene des Genoms

Kußmotiv der sterbenden Genbanker

ENDE

5. Examples of some of the pages from the artist’s book:

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

–

6. The artist’s book:

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

artist´s book

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

7. **Text by Siegfried Zielinski, 2015:**

«Genomische Oper: Ein Bestiarium für Bewusstseine des 21. Jahrhunderts»

Lange Zeit funktionierte der Dualismus als bequeme Denkprothese. Wir unterschieden zwischen Künstlern, die ihre Gestaltungsprozesse wesentlich als Kopfgeburten generieren und solchen, die wesentlich aus dem Bauch heraus operieren. Begrifflicher und medientheoretisch ausgedrückt: Soft- und Hardwareorientierung wurden als oppositionelle, oftmals als antagonistische Haltungen interpretiert. Das war im 20. Jahrhundert die Entsprechung zum Körper-Seele-Dualismus des europäischen Mittelalters, der in der Moderne ausgefächert entfaltet worden ist.
In der subversiven Perspektive der Alchemie zum Beispiel wurde im Hinblick auf diesen Dualismus schon in der Vormoderne heftiger Widerspruch angemeldet. Dass die Seele selbst ganz und gar Fleisch wäre, weil die Materie nichts anderes als modifizierter Geist mit sehr unterschiedlichen Erscheinungsformen darstellt und folglich umgekehrt das Geistige filigrane Ausformulierungen des Materiellen darstellt, war aus der Tradition der vor-sokratischen Philosophie der alten Griechen bekannt. Die Adepten und Zauberlehrlinge der Alchemie machten eine experimentelle Praxis und eine geheimnisvoll und hermetisch begründete Weltanschauung daraus. Der lapis philosophorum, der Stein der Weisen, der in der letzten Stufe der Transmutation auf die immer noch gemeine Materie geworfen wird, um sie schließlich zu veredeln und mit meta-physischer Bedeutung aufzuladen, ist beides: pulverisierter Stoff der Verwandlung und Algorithmus im Sinne einer Order, die aus den naturwissenschaftlichen Experimenten heraus destilliert worden ist.

–

In einer solchen subversiven Tradition arbeitet der argentinische Künstler Marcello Mercado mit radikaler Konsequenz wie schier überbordender Energie und Einbildungskraft. In einer der ersten Performances, die ich von ihm vor nahezu 20 Jahren sah, konfrontierte er die komplexen elektronischen und digitalen Maschinen einer millionenschweren Nachbearbeitungsanlage mit seinem nackten Körper und den Nöten der in ihn eingeschlossenen und herausdrängenden Psyche. Mit der ganzen Kraft seiner sinnlichen Erkenntnis und Erfahrung arbeitete er sich in das Generieren künstlicher Bild- und Tonwelten ein und entwickelte mit Das Kapital einen gigantischen Werkzyklus, der kein Ende finden kann, weil er Obsession und folglich nicht linear, sondern dynamisch und chaotisch organisiert ist. Die visuelle und akustische Sprache, die M2 für seine extrem idiosynkratische Interpretation des Kapitals als einzelner politischer Ökonomie des Körpers erfunden hat, ist ein ständiger Prozess der Transformation von Daten und Relationen in erfahrbare Sensationen und Aggressionen, die exzessiv wuchern und bereits eine Gesamtlaufzeit von weit über 40 Stunden erreicht haben.

–

Parallel zur Verwandlungsarbeit Das Kapital begann M2 in den letzten gut zehn Jahren, sich an genomischen Materialien zu versuchen. Sein Atelier wurde zum biologischen und chemischen Versuchslabor; er grub im Freien, extrahierte Lebenssäfte von Pflanzen und Tieren und begann, sie ebenso obsessiv aufzutrennen und zu mischen, wie er das mit den Datenpaketen seines Computers und den aufgezeichneten Materialien seiner Analogmaschinen tut. Der schwule Kino-Mythos Fassbinder und der heterosexuelle Fluxus-Mythos Vostell waren real nie zusammen. M2 mischte die genetischen Informationen der beiden vermittels von Extrakten, die er aus Blumen von ihren Gräbern gewann, und vereinigte sie in Zeichnungen, die er mit den gewonnen Genommaterialien realisierte. Die Grenzen zwischen Virtualität und Realität verschwimmen.

–

In seinem Bestiarium für Bewusstseine des 21. Jahrhunderts führt M2 nun verschiedene Stränge seiner Arbeit aus den letzten Jahrzehnten zusammen und treibt sie so zu einem Höhepunkt. Wie beim Kapital, das er als Oratorium konzipiert und für das er mehrere Libretti schrieb, treibt er sein Experiment mit der Oper als einer ästhetischen Gattung voran, in der Präzision und Leidenschaft auf besondere Weise miteinander dialogisieren. Klänge werden in visuell wahrnehmbare Muster übersetzt. Im Unterschied zu den legendären Figuren Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladnis aus dem 18. Jahrhundert transformiert er allerdings die zeitlichen Ausdehnungen und Intervalle im Hörbaren nicht nur auf der Fläche, sondern in dreidimensionalen Objekten. Die Klänge werden nach ihrer Verwandlung in Datenpakete als längliche Skulpturen in schreienden Farben ausgedruckt, die auf einer Notation als wellige Informationsstrukturen im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes erfassbar sind. Mit piezo-elektronischen Mikrophonen als Interfaces kann der Besucher der Oper die Oberflächen des Materials abtasten, der experimentelle Apparat übersetzt die dadurch neu entstehenden Klänge wiederum in graphische Strukturen und macht die ursprüngliche Komposition nun als Ergebnis taktiler Begegnungen im Ton-Bild-Werk noch einmal und ganz anders erfahrbar.

–

Dass M2 mit dieser Genomischen Oper einen Beitrag zur Weiterentwicklung des Variantenreichtums unserer biologischen Welt leisten will, den er im zeitgenössischen Standardisierungsschub bedroht sieht, ist eine zusätzliche Leseebene, die zu kennen aber keine notwendige Voraussetzung für den ästhetischen und intellektuellen Genuss des Werkes ist. Wie in Das Kapital entfaltet sich sein Drängen in die nicht zu disziplinierende Heterogenität als Akrobatenakt auf dem Drahtseil, das zwischen Programm und Imagination, zwischen Vorschrift und aus der Zensur drängenden Phantasie über dem Abgrund unserer Wirklichkeit aufgespannt ist.»

–

Siegfried Zielinski, Berlin 2015

8. Exhibition I, 2016:

DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA Exhibition

Opening at Angewandte Innovation Laboratory in Vienna on March 10, 2016

Angewandte Innovation Laboratory
Franz Josefs Kai 3
1010 Vienna, Austria

9. Exhibition II, 2016:

16.05.2016 – 22.05.2016

ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art

ISEA International Foundation
C. Kouwenbergzoom 107
3065 KC Rotterdam
The Netherlands

ISEA International Headquarters
University of Brighton
Faculty of Arts
School of Art, Design and Media
Grand Parade
Brighton
BN2 0JY
United Kingdom

10. Book, 2016:

Digital Synesthesia

A Model for the Aesthetics of Digital Art

Edited by: Katharina Gsöllpointner , Ruth Schnell and Romana Karla Schuler

De Gruyterbrill

27 abril, 2025 In Archive, Art, Bioart, Brühl, Compost, Genome, Installation, Media, Performance, Radio, Soundart

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies

Marcello Mercado

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007

Bio-Performance / Bio-Installation, 2007

In Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, Marcello Mercado crafts a meditation on mortality, memory, and the biological archive, unfolding across two interconnected actions in Kassel and Brühl in 2007. Initiated by the extraction of DNA from red poppies gathered from Sanja Iveković’s Poppy Field at Documenta Kassel, and culminating in its dissolution into the aquatic habitat of Biomphalaria glabrata worms, the project weaves together ephemeral transmission, organic processes, and technological mediation.

At its core, the work proposes a volatile circuit of memory: by transmitting the worms’ own genomic sequences back to them via walkie-talkies, Mercado reenacts an ancient gesture—the whispered reminder of mortality to a triumphant general—reinscribed into the molecular language of life. Rather than offering a static image of death, the piece stages a living, recursive inscription, where information becomes both a medium and a memento.

The project aligns with ideas of media deep time, where archives are not merely human inventions but are entangled with biological and environmental substrata. Rather than preserving information, Memento Mori Genómico lets it mutate and circulate, embodying a processual temporality that challenges linear notions of memory and death. The unstable transmission through radio frequencies mirrors the instability inherent in biological memory itself, where error, mutation, and dissolution are constitutive forces.

Drawing implicitly from contemporary curatorial thinking that sees archives as dynamic, entropic systems—never fixed, always partial—the performance dissolves the separation between biological material, technological mediation, and cultural residue. It suggests, as certain strands of contemporary theory have proposed, that every act of storing, transferring, and sharing information is also an act of transformation and loss.

In this fluid landscape, biological entities are no longer passive subjects of observation but active carriers of information, echoing broader shifts in contemporary bio-art towards performative, unstable, and relational practices. Mercado’s choice to use the fragile and modest technology of walkie-talkies further displaces the narrative of technological mastery, foregrounding instead a poetics of vulnerability and transmission error.

Between Kassel’s global stage and the quieter, hidden life of Brühl, Memento Mori Genómico moves between monumental cultural time and the microscopic temporality of organic life. It inhabits a space where memory is not monumentalized but continuously renegotiated—where archives are not preservations of presence, but processes of inevitable metamorphosis.

In the end, Mercado’s work suggests that mortality, memory, and information share a deeper kinship: all are fleeting, porous, and materially bound. All are, inevitably, transmitted with noise.

Marcello Mercado
Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information
through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007
Bio-Performance – Bio-Installation,
04′ 00″
stereo 4:3 colour

27 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Brühl, Compost, Genome, Installation, Live Streaming, Media, Performance

transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus

Marcello Mercado

Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding: The perfect humus, 2010 – 2011

Series of Ephemeral Video-Installations

In Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding, a series of ephemeral video-installations created in 2010 – 2011, Marcello Mercado addresses the unstable materialities of memory, inheritance, and technological residues. Drawing from the human genome, sound art, satellite streams, and digital archives, these works cultivate a living humus where organic and synthetic legacies are intertwined, constantly shifting, never fixed.

Memory is not presented as a static repository but as a volatile negotiation—a territory of transmission, mutation, and erosion. Information, whether embedded in DNA sequences or encoded in cultural databases, leaks, hybridizes, and transforms. It is less about the accumulation of gigabytes, terabytes, or zettabytes, and more about the precarious entanglements that such excess inevitably generates.

Set within natural environments, these installations articulate an ecology of interdependencies: moss, water, wood, speakers, radio waves, and glass vials compose fragile assemblages where the biological and the technological are co-implicated. Rather than illustrating hybridity, the work enacts it, inserting the viewer into circuits of multispecies, multimodal transmission. The satellite feed merges with the genome, the sound frequencies seep into the moss, the archival impulse dissolves into entropy.

Contemporary existence, the installations suggest, is conditioned by acts of translation, contamination, and remix. Storage becomes indistinguishable from distortion; preservation, from mutation. Rather than clinging to the idea of pristine archives, Transferring proposes memory as a field of unstable assemblages, a site where pasts and futures cross-contaminate each other.

This sensibility resonates with a broader shift in curatorial and theoretical practices toward non-linear temporalities, recursive histories, and distributed agencies. The installations breathe with the recognition that every archive—genetic or digital—operates under conditions of uncertainty, exposed to forces beyond control. Storage is never neutral; it is a practice haunted by loss, noise, and decay.

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By embracing the ephemeral, Mercado’s work departs from traditional notions of durability and fixity. It stages memory as performative, fugitive, and entangled with material processes of transformation. The event of the installation is not a means to preserve information, but a way to let it mutate and regenerate—through sound, matter, time.

In Transferring, no single medium or agent holds primacy. Human, machine, organism, and environment form shifting networks of action and reaction, echoing deeper inquiries into posthuman entanglements and networked materialities. Information is neither inert nor pure: it is an active participant in an ecology of residues.

Ultimately, these ephemeral constellations reflect a vital awareness: that in an era of accelerating technological proliferation, what matters is not the preservation of stable identities, but the capacity to inhabit instability, to cultivate porous, living archives that remain open to transformation.

Marcello Mercado

transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The perfect humus

Hybrid-DNA-Performance-Bio-installation

2010-2011, Germany

Running time: 16’23»

4:3

Colour/B/W

Music by Marcello Mercado

26 abril, 2025 In 3D scanners, A.I., Animation, Archive, Berlin, Bioart, Collection, Das Kapital, Denmark, Drawings, Film, Genéve, Gödel, Grant MacArthur Foundation, Installation, Kapital, Köln, Media, Music, Music Notations, paintings, Performance, Radio, softart, Soundart, Texts, Videoart

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

Marcello Mercado

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

2000 -2025

Dead Code Anatomies

The Economy of Residues: Temporal Assemblages of Capital and Body

Gödel Suite, 2009

Marcello Mercado: Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

Marcello Mercado: Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements, 2005

DELETE

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus

Trace, Burn, Archive, 2005 – 2008

Index – Generator, Performance, 2004

Listening the chromosome 17, 1-channel Video Installation, 2023

Human Genome re-Activation – Low Lives 3 International Festival of Live Networked Performances, 2011

To whom belongs the Time?

How to explain to a dead mole the difference between…? Performance, 2001

Azimuth 77, Performance, 2006

Confinment, Artist´s book, 82 pages, 2020

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies

The algorithm, 2024, Process art – New media art – AI

How leopards caught leopards

Burning Garden – 2024

Curves, compost, forecasts and closures, Performance, 2020

26 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Installation, Kapital, Köln, Performance, Videoart

The Economy of Residues: Temporal Assemblages of Capital and Body

Marcello Mercado

The Economy of Residues: Temporal Assemblages of Capital and Body

1996 . 2004

The Economy of Residues (2004) is an experimental performance-installation articulating biological material, cognitive labor, and technological obsolescence into an operative system. Through the controlled circulation of human urine collected during readings of Das Kapital, a transitional cash register from early 20th-century commerce, and projected video documentation, the work constructs a closed field where processes of expenditure, decay, and thought are directly observed. The Economy of Residues (2004) proposes a model for studying parallel economies of waste and value at the intersection of body, text, and apparatus.

Between April 8 and 13, 2004, Marcello Mercado presented the performance-installation The Economy of Residues in a temporary exhibition space, Kunst Klub Köln, located at Hans-Böckler-Platz/Bahnhof West, Cologne. The event was curated by Marcus Broecker,

The work consisted of three operational phases involving video projection, bodily material extraction, and the construction of a closed circulation apparatus. The project maintains an analytical approach to the relationships between human biological processes, intellectual labor, and obsolete technological devices within capitalist economies.

Phase 1: Archival Projection (1996–2004)

A video recorded in 1996 in Córdoba, Argentina, documents the artist’s initial verbal explorations in the week he received a $20,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for a project centered on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.
The projection registers a disorganized, pre-discursive attempt to articulate the conceptual field of the project. No narrative structure is imposed on the material; the video operates as clinical documentation of the project’s origination state, prior to formal articulation. The projected image functions as a temporal anchor, situating the installation within a multi-phasic economy of intellectual labor and capital investment.

Phase 2: Biological Material Extraction (2003–2004)

Subsequent to intensive reading sessions of chapters 8, 17, and 22 of Das Kapital, Mercado collected his own urine.
Each sample was gathered immediately post-reading, without delay, ensuring minimum metabolic deviation. The urine was not chemically treated or altered. No external agents were introduced.
The biological material was treated as a direct index of cognitive expenditure — operational and measurable: a secretion corresponding precisely to a defined act of intellectual labor.

Following the work of Shannon Jackson and Rebecca Schneider on performance as maintenance and residue, Mercado established a strict procedural economy: the materiality of bodily waste was integrated into the performative system.

Phase 3: Circulation Apparatus Assembly (2004)

The central physical structure was assembled using:

1. An early 20th-century antique wooden cash register (Whoppah), height 46 cm, width 38 cm, depth 53 cm, built in oak. This wooden cash register represents a transitional phase between the early cast iron mechanical registers (such as those produced by NCR) and the later electric or digital models.
Crafted largely by hand and often produced in limited series, many of these pieces featured oak finishes, typical of models designed for prestigious businesses at the beginning of the twentieth century, including pharmacies, watchmakers, and banks.
An emblem of commercial culture, this type of register reflects the flourishing of urban retail markets and the growing trust in the mechanical recording of financial transactions.
Numerous manufacturers specialized in commercial instruments and registers during this period, such as Anker Werke, based in Bielefeld. This particular piece was acquired at an auction in Cologne in 2003.

2. Transparent rubber tubing connecting the urine to internal channels within the cash register.

3. Laboratory glassware, including thermometers

4. Surgical scissors for potential manual interventions.

5. Corrugated cardboard structures for stabilization.

The urine samples were circulated through the internal body of the cash register via gravity and manual intervention, without mechanical pumps. The device was fully visible to the audience, placed directly on the gallery floor without pedestals or protective barriers.

In the logic of media archaeology as developed by Siegfried Zielinski, the selection of a transitional technological device — an analog, partially manual cash register — functions as a concrete insertion of temporal obsolescence into a living circuit. The cash register, designed for quantification and validation of value, was reoperationalized as a substrate for biological residues.

Analytical Considerations

The installation frames a closed operational circuit where material processes unfold without recourse to symbolic functions. Urine, extracted post-cognitive exertion, is circulated through a technologically obsolete device, repurposed not for historical reference but for the real-time management of metabolic waste.

The projection of the 1996 video establishes a temporal axis of deferred action, recording the project’s initial cognitive investment and linking it materially to the physiological outputs of reading and analysis performed years later.

Biological material, intellectual energy, and mechanical infrastructure interact under controlled parameters, generating a live field of procedural operations.

The apparatus neither represents nor signifies. It activates. It institutes real economies of transformation, linking bodily waste, cognitive depletion, and technological redundancy in a dynamic operational ecology.

The Economy of Residues delineates an operative field where cognitive, biological, and technological residues are no longer separated by disciplinary boundaries but analyzed as components of a continuous system of expenditure and transformation.Each temporal stratum remains autonomous while linked through the procedural logic of the work.

21 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Compost, Gödel, Performance

Gödel Suite, 2009

Marcello Mercado

Gödel Suite, Baden-Baden

1h Performance

2009

This one-hour performance took place in the Napoleon Suite of a hotel in Baden-Baden in 2009. The artist staged a clinical operation with two plastic containers, each containing compost, California red worms (Eisenia fetida), and a printed version of one of Gödel’s two incompleteness theorems. Each container was assigned a specific theorem – the first and second, respectively – creating an operational dissociation.

The performance followed a precise protocol. Both containers were placed on the bed of the suite, on a sterilized white surface. A laser device was positioned to intermittently activate beams directed at the compost masses. Throughout the one-hour duration, fragments of Gödel’s theoretical formulations – translated into sound – were transmitted to the containers via a CD player and a portable military radio system. No outside audience was present. No symbolic gestures were made.

The action was clinically closed. A sterilized green surgical drape was used to cover the entire scene at the end of the procedure. No commentary was provided and no textual explanation was provided at the site.

This work does not intend to represent Gödel’s theorems. It acts upon them. The performance subjects these theorems – considered fundamental limits of formal logic – to biological decomposition. The worms digest without interpretation. The artist does not take authorship of the decomposition, but becomes its procedural agent. The plastic containers function as epistemological cells: finite environments with a strictly defined purpose.

In line with Gödel’s formulation of incompleteness – where any consistent formal system capable of expressing basic arithmetic is necessarily incomplete – performance introduces an irreversible event: Decomposition. Once subjected to decay, the logical integrity of the theorems is no longer preserved as a cognitive artifact, but as an organic residue. The separation of the two theorems into independent composts suggests a dissociation of limits: one of provability, the other of system self-validation. They are not opposed to each other, but parallel to each other and degraded separately.

Here, the clinical approach to logic resonates with contemporary curatorial frameworks. Anita Haldemann’s forensic treatment of conceptual drawing, Chus Martínez’s investigations into speculative epistemologies, and Sebastián Vidal Mackinson’s curatorial approaches to logic-based performativity all support readings that locate performance not in allegory but in direct, structured operation.

Duration plays a critical role. The worms act slowly. The performance does not document transformation – it initiates it. The artist does not accelerate, complete, or alter the natural pace of the event. The decomposition remains partially invisible, imperceptible within the given time frame, yet fully initiated. Maria Lind’s writing on «compost politics« provides a lens for understanding slow, non-representational knowledge production. Similarly, Rosa Lleó’s interest in post-natural time and Catherine de Zegher’s focus on invisible spatial gestures enrich the reading of this temporal layer.

Light Intervention: A handheld laser traced subtle lines across the compost bins, activating the performative space as a site of speculative measurement-mapping invisibilities and referencing both data collection and epistemic limits.

The decomposition of the theorems into their own containers-each a closed system-materialized Gödel’s insight that no formal system can be both complete and consistent. The worms acted as biological agents enacting undecidability, devouring the internal limits of reason itself.

This work continues Mercado’s exploration of the body, language, and information as ephemeral substrates. The performance recalls early interventions in conceptual and body–based practices, while establishing a new dialogue with strands of bioart that explore identity, decay, and techno–organic thresholds.

19 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Denmark, Installation, Köln, Performance

Trace, Burn, Archive, 2005 – 2008

Marcello Mercado

Trace, Burn, Archive (2005–2008)

Performances Series

In Trace, Burn, Archive, Marcello Mercado conducts a five-part performance series in Denmark and Germany, using his own DNA as both material and message. Between 2005 and 2008, each action explores a different relationship to the body’s trace – its preservation, dispersal, destruction, and withdrawal.

From burning his DNA on a surgical gauze in a coastal fire to burying it in a geometrically excavated hole, destroying it with a hammer, or temporarily entombing it in a cemetery, Mercado moves between intimate, domestic spaces and industrial, public terrains. The series reflects on the status of the biological self in an age of data, biotechnology, and surveillance, and engages critically with contemporary bioart and performance practices.

Rather than seeking permanence, Trace, Burn, Archive stages the volatility and impermanence of identity. Influenced by thinkers such as Siegfried Zielinski, the series embraces fragility, disappearance, and non–archival gestures that resist fixation and affirm the right to disappear.

Protocol I: Fire

Performance, 2005 (Part I of V)

In 2005, on the Danish coast near Gedesby beach, the artist initiated a long–term performative cycle consisting of five actions in Denmark and Germany. Each action directly engaged the artist’s own biological material – specifically DNA – as medium, residue, and conceptual axis. These procedures alternated between the destruction and preservation of genetic traces, unfolding a paradoxical relationship to selfhood, corporeality, and archiving.

The first action was simple and austere: the artist removed a sterilized surgical towel from a sealed bag, placed a biological sample containing his DNA on it, and then placed the green towel over an open fire, allowing it to burn completely. The act was performed alone, in an open landscape, without an audience or documentation beyond memory and minimal notes.

Subsequent actions between Cologne, Brühl, and Gedesby continued this exploration: in some, the DNA was carefully embedded in holes in urban construction zones or shallow excavations made by the artist himself, protected and left as a latent archive; in others, the material was eliminated through controlled combustion. The gestures operated between care and erasure, preservation and liberation, echoing scientific protocols while resisting their teleology.

Siegfried Zielinski’s media-archaeological approach offers a useful lens through which to interpret these actions. His notion of “variantology”—the excavation of divergent and peripheral technological histories—resonates with this practice’s refusal to stabilize or monumentalize biological identity. Instead, the work stages DNA as something volatile, contingent, and context-dependent: not a stable origin, but a fragile trace submitted to the weather, to combustion, to burial.

At its core, Trace, Burn, Archive and its subsequent iterations propose a tension: between the biological permanence of DNA and the performative ephemerality of its exposure. Neither fetishizing nor denying the body, the project subjects it to a series of irreversible choices executed with almost forensic clarity, leaving behind a paradoxical archive-simultaneously intimate and inaccessible.

Protocol II: Displacement

Performance, 2005 (Part II of V)

The second chapter in a five-part cycle that explores the artist’s biological material as both medium and conceptual trace, Protocol II unfolds within the impersonal landscape of an urban construction site in Germany.

For this action, the artist took advantage of the site’s transitory infrastructure: a large industrial waste container and an adjacent mound of earth, presumably the byproduct of an excavation. Climbing to the top of the mound, he placed a sample of his own DNA on the top. A second portion of the same sample was placed inside the container itself, hidden among the debris. These gestures were made quietly, without announcement or documentation, and the site was subsequently abandoned. The artist boarded a bus and left the area, never returning to the site.

The use of building materials and terrain-temporary, utilitarian, anonymous-underscores the performance’s relationship to dislocation, ephemerality, and the politics of bodily presence. The industrial context becomes not only a stage, but a co-author of the gesture. DNA, a persistent marker of identity, is circulated in an indifferent environment, deprived of narrative support or symbolic closure.

In dialogue with the discourse of bioart, this action resonates with practices that deal with the material traces of the body without spectacularization. Unlike the aestheticized use of biotechnology in laboratory-based works, this performance exists within the informal logic of urban processes: excavation, discard, instability. It echoes conceptual strategies found in the work of Brandon Ballengée or Kira O’Reilly, but operates with a distinctly minimal vocabulary – displacement, withdrawal, sedimentation.

The act also invites reflection on territorial and bodily autonomy. As Paul B. Preciado has argued, the body today is a «pharmaco-political archive,» constantly encoded, sampled, and managed. In this performance, the artist stages a modest refusal: the archive is not stored, but abandoned, made inaccessible to systems of control and authorship.

DNA becomes an unmarked anomaly within the construction site’s own transformation – neither waste nor monument, but latency.

With Protocol II: Displacement, the artist extends the cycle’s investigation into the ambivalence of presence: not erasure, but alienation; not exhibition, but silent insertion. The biological trace once again evades stabilization, leaving its meaning to sediment elsewhere, or perhaps nowhere at all.

Protocol III: Interruption

Performance, 2006 (Part III of V)

Performed in the privacy of the artist’s apartment in Cologne, this third action turns inward – toward the interior of the body and the limits of its traceability. Using a sterile cotton swab, the artist extracted a sample of his own DNA from the inside of his mouth. He then placed the swab on a hard surface and crushed it with a single, decisive blow of a hammer.

Protocol IV: Recess

Performance, 2005 (Part IV of V)

This fourth action in the ongoing cycle was carried out on the outskirts of Brühl, Germany. A geometric excavation in the shape of a capital «L» was executed according to a digital model previously designed and constructed by the artist using 3D modeling software. Into this carefully calculated void, the artist placed a sample of his own DNA.

Departing from earlier actions that focused on negation or erasure, Protocol IV introduces a spatialized logic of inscription. The L-shaped cavity interrupts the natural surface of the terrain, articulating a deliberate intervention in which the body-information is materially transferred into form.

This artificial geometry – precise – functions as a spatial abstraction of identity. As bioart theorist Jens Hauser has suggested, such «epistemological performances« do not merely stage the biological, but explore how knowledge and presence are structured through space, tools, and bodily residues.

Here, DNA is neither circulated nor destroyed; it is housed in a sculptural void designed to withhold rather than display, The work does not seek legibility or memory, but produces a silent topology of withdrawal.

What remains is not a relic, but a recess. A sign of presence rendered spatial, encoded in negative volume.

Protocol V: Transitory Interment

Performance, 2008 (Part V of V)

The final installment of this five-part series took place in 2008, following a surgical procedure to remove the artist’s tonsils. After a period of recovery, the artist visited Cologne’s Melaten Cemetery with a wheelbarrow full of fresh flowers. In a brief but deliberate act, the flowers – linked to the missing tissue – were buried in the ground of the cemetery for exactly ten minutes before being exhumed and removed.

Unlike the previous actions, which oscillated between dispersal, containment, and obliteration, Protocol V enacts a temporary burial: a ritualistic, measured gesture in which the organic and the ephemeral converge. The performance articulates a body in the threshold, not of visibility, but of transformation and latency.

The corporeal fragments circulate in recursive loops of exposure and concealment. The performance displaces the remains of the body into a terrain where biological, aesthetic, and memorial values intersect, however briefly.

What is buried is not memory, but duration. The interval – ten minutes – becomes the real material of the work.

17 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Genéve, Gödel, Installation, Performance, Radio, Texts

Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

In 2006, a performative apparatus was activated within a hotel room in Geneva—an environment operating simultaneously as a spatial container and a neutralized architecture of regulation. The performance constructed a field of epistemic operations based on the formal structure of Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems (1931), which remain fundamental to mathematical logic and the philosophy of formal systems.

Two compost containers functioned as epistemological devices. Each was assigned one of Gödel’s theorems, not to symbolize them, but to act as operational surfaces through which non-decidability and internal inconsistency could be performed materially. Rather than creating narrative or symbolic readings, the setup deployed the composts as experimental variables—unstable matter undergoing entropic processes of decomposition and transformation.

From the curatorial perspective of performance studies—as developed by RoseLee Goldberg and later rearticulated in André Lepecki’s analysis of movement, immobility, and time—the piece displaced the body as the primary site of performance and instead foregrounded abstract systems, feedback loops, and logical structures as the protagonists of the performative event.

The First Incompleteness Theorem, applied to one container, asserts that any consistent formal system capable of expressing arithmetic will contain true statements that are unprovable within the system. The compost associated with this theorem functioned as a generative system outside of full codification: a dynamic substrate whose processes could be observed, perturbed, but never entirely mapped or resolved.

The Second Incompleteness Theorem, linked to the second container, states that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency. This recursive impossibility was spatialized in the performance through a set of actions that denied the possibility of internal closure: the use of a laser (a high-frequency, deterministic tool) applied to an unpredictable surface; the attempt to communicate with a non-human medium via a walkie-talkie in an invented, non-indexical language; and the eventual covering of the entire operation with a sterile green surgical drape, interrupting visibility and suspending verification.

This final gesture—the occlusion—directly responds to what Adrian Heathfield has termed “the aesthetics of disappearance” in performance: the refusal of full visibility, the staging of ungraspable phenomena, and the challenge to archival logic. However, rather than romanticizing ephemerality, the work maintained a rational structure: each action was part of a logical sequence of procedural constraints. The invented language was not expressive but formal, a system without reference but complete in its syntax—testing the boundaries of communication theory and transmission logic.

Catherine Wood’s writings on performance in institutional contexts resonate here: by activating performance as a system rather than spectacle, and by replacing the performer’s body with materials governed by formal limits, the work interrogated not only the boundaries of the artwork but also the systems through which knowledge is generated, represented, and contained.

The presence of technological elements—walkie-talkie, laser, surgical drape—was not incidental. These were selected and deployed as devices of precision, transmission, and sterilization. They acted as tools of systematization inserted into an environment that refused stabilization. Chantal Pontbriand’s framing of performance as “research in real time” becomes particularly relevant here: the performance did not seek to represent undecidability—it tested it under tightly controlled yet unresolvable conditions.

Rather than proposing allegory or metaphor, the performance operated as a material experiment with formal limits. It proposed a non-human-centric, system-based structure that echoed the foundational limits of rational knowledge as defined by mathematical logic. The choice of Geneva—epicenter of international standardization, diplomacy, and techno-scientific governance—further reinforced the work’s relationship to epistemic control and its necessary breakdowns.

In this sense, the performance may be read not as an artwork but as a temporary epistemological lab: a controlled failure of system closure.

16 abril, 2025 In Bioart, Das Kapital, paintings, Performance, Soundart, Texts, Transcripts

Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements, 2005

Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements

2005

Conceptual Framework
This performance unfolds within a conceptual triangle: Max Weber’s reading of Calvinism as the ethical substrate of capitalism, John Calvin’s moral rehabilitation of profit through moderation and discipline, and Karl Marx’s critique of capital’s capacity to profit from catastrophe. The work weaves biography, theology, botany, and financial history into a live epistemological and aesthetic protocol.

Movement I: Grave Visit / Extraction

Location: Geneva, Switzerland
On the first day, I visited the unadorned grave of John Calvin, marked No. 707, in the Cimetière des Rois. The site itself resists monumentality, mirroring Calvin’s ascetic rejection of iconography. In a gesture of symbolic extraction, I collected a branch of Ligustrum vulgare (common privet), growing near the burial site—an act of vegetal sampling, situated between pilgrimage and appropriation.

Max Weber relates John Calvin to the emergence of a Protestant ethic that permits—and even values—economic activities such as lending money with interest, something that had been prohibited or morally condemned in medieval Catholic tradition. This connection appears mainly in his work «The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism», first published between 1904 and 1905.

Breaking with the traditional condemnation of interest
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church condemned usury (charging interest on loans), based on biblical interpretations. Profit in itself was viewed negatively. However, John Calvin reinterpreted Scripture and argued that charging interest was not intrinsically immoral, as long as it was done in moderation and without exploiting those in need. This was a key shift in the moral view of money and its use.
Rationalization of work and profit
Weber explains that Calvinism promoted a worldview in which hard work, discipline, and the accumulation of wealth were signs of being «chosen» by God. Within the framework of predestination (a core Calvinist doctrine), believers could not know whether they were saved, so they looked for external signs—such as economic success and morally austere living—as confirmation of their «election.»
Moral validation of lending and capital
In this new context, lending money with interest becomes a rational and legitimate activity, even virtuous when done responsibly. It is part of the ethos of emerging capitalism: not only permitted, but seen as an ordered, planned act useful for economic development.

Weber shows that Calvinist thought profoundly changed the view of money, interest, and labor. What was once a sin became a virtue, provided it was embedded in a framework of rationality, self-discipline, and ascetic morality. Thus, the economy ceased to be in conflict with religion and began to merge with ethics, preparing the cultural and ideological ground for modern capitalism.

Movement II: Botanical Intervention / DNA Extraction

Location: Hotel Room, Geneva
Within a sterile setting—a generic hotel room, echoing the impersonal logic of global capitalism—I conducted a basic DNA extraction from the Ligustrum specimen. This laboratory-like act evoked both Calvinist precision and the mechanization of life processes. Here, Calvin’s reformative spirituality meets post-genomic materiality.

Movement III: Transmutation / Chromatic Alchemy

Location: Cologne, Germany
Back in my studio in Köln, I initiated a chromatic transmutation. The extracted DNA was blended with Sambucus nigra (elderberry) dye, a historically potent pigment and medicinal agent, and traditional oil paint. This hybrid preparation—organic, symbolic, and technological—became the material substrate for the pictorial phase. It was both painting medium and biosemiotic archive.

Movement IV: Marxist Re-Inscription / Portraits of the Unrecorded

Drawing on Karl Marx’s account of the Vulcan Street fire (Chapter 25, Capital, Volume I), where tragedy becomes surplus, I imagined two anonymous victims of that fire—lives erased by both bureaucracy and economic abstraction. Their absent presences were re-embodied through two paintings of heads, rendered with the DNA-oil-elderberry mixture. The brushwork recalled the gestural instability of memory under erasure.

Marcello Mercado

Unknown I

42cm x 59,4cm, mixed media on paper

2005

Marcello Mercado

Unknown II

42cm x 59,4cm, mixed media on paper

2005

Movement V: Flames / Asphalt Syntax

With the remaining hybrid material, I painted four tongues of flame—abstract yet evocative—superimposing layers of asphalt paint. The black industrial texture referenced both the ruins of capital and the corporeality of urban collapse. These paintings functioned as devotional icons to entropy: combustion as symbol, system, and soul.