Trace, Burn, Archive, 2005 – 2008

Marcello Mercado

Trace, Burn, Archive (2005–2008)

Performances Series

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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.