[Live Performance + Salon] Ask Aphrodite: Advice on Love and Copper

A series of performance in which Marisa Morán Jahn conjures her alter ego, Aphrodite, goddess of love and copper. Addressing the audience as both lover and threat, Jahn uses the language of relationships to explore resource extraction and mineral dependency. “You need me; I’m already in your blood and regulate your devices. But above 5 milligrams a day, I will start to take over until what seems most sovereign — your own body — becomes mine.” Her performance at WNYC on Jan 11, 2023 draws on previous iterations at Creative Time, PS1/MoMA, and Arsenal Gallery NYC but is adapted for a 6-camera live broadcast.

[Video] Snatchural History of Copper

One day, as I was filing some paperwork, I came across my medical records where it had been written: “Birth Control — Copper T Intrauterine Device (IUD).” How could I be so ignorant about this piece of technology that’s inside my very own snatch? Then, my self-disappointment then turned to wonder. How does the copper even work and when did they figure this out? And where did the copper in my snatch come from? I needed to know what’s at stake.

So begins a SNATCHural HISTORY of COPPER, a project in which artist Marisa Morán Jahn traces “where the copper in my snatch comes from.” What unfolds is a cosmological exploration of a mineral that lives with(in) us and on which our households, cities, digital desires and selves depend. Jahn’s recognition that the journey is ultimately about “mine(s) and others — how we understand ourselves and each other through the earth” evokes Giorgio Agamben notion of the ‘alchemical work’ (opus alchymicum): “The transformation of metals occurs hand in hand with the transformation of the subject… the care of the self necessarily passes through an opus; it inextricably implies an alchemy.” Weaving together science, myth, and politics to make new connections, a SNATCHural HISTORY of COPPER invites the public into an alchemical and humorous experience of urgent ecological issues today.

[Participatory Installation] Snatchural Chapel

The SNATCHural Chapel is a pop-up tensile structure sewn from conductive copper silk created by Jahn and designed by architect Rafi Segal. Cross-form in structure, it derives influence from both space pods and Byzantine-era fertility temples. Before visitors to the installation enter the SNATCHural Chapel, they encounter incarnations of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess love and copper, who ritualistically present a series of copper-based artifacts: a contemporary IUD, a replica of a copper-based contraceptive device (“pessary”) from 400 BCE Rome, and a motherboard. Together, the three artifacts present a fascinating story of extimacy (the mediation of intimacy through technology) and raise questions about how we understand technology altogether. The Snatchural Chapel was performatively activated at Creative Time X, 2019 with curatorial collaborator Amy Rosenblum Martín.

[Digital Print] Bang!

A metallic (sparkly) sublimated dye print, Bang! (2019) is a 21st century feminist adaptation of Gustav Courbet’s ‘L’Origine du Monde’ (origin of the world), a painting from 1866 recognized for the erotic charge of its male gaze. Jahn’s version puts forward that the fulfillment of women’s desire in hetero encounters exists necessarily via access to reproductive technology, such as the copper IUD seen here.

[Writing]

• ”Against Extraction: Digital Storytelling as Relational Transformation.” Immerse, March 20, 2020

• ”Mine(s) and Others.” Media-N| The Journal of the New Media CaucusFall 2021: Volume 17, Issue 2, Pages 39–48ISSN: 1942-017X