Decon grounds its practices and its records on one continuum : it explicitly evokes the figures of Mondrian and of Derrida, and associates both to biotechnologies. It seems to me that this is a doubly enlightening gesture. In the first place because it makes clear (I'm tempted to type �illuminates�) a kind of deep relation that we can devise as extant between Mondrian's �new plasticism�, Derrida's �deconstruction� and the most unquietening possession of biotechnologies: the potentiality of recomposing nature entirely. Furthermore, Decon revisits the question of the border between art and science, calling for its disassembling (one might say deconstruction proper) through an �enchanted� explanation of biotechnologies, an explanation that is not only confined to its representation but that is inscribed both materially and procedurally in this installation work, which seems to us imbued with what we might call non-representational traits. In De Stijl, Mondrian was promoting a form of reduction. The �pure� plastic vision that Mondrian called his own had the purpose not only to explore and decompose nature�abstracting all forms and all colours�but also, similarly to its contemporary Bauhaus in a different context, aimed for a new society based on and regulated by the perceptual purity of straight lines and primary colours as clearly defined as possible (that is to say, technically defined). This brings us close to the reduccionist strategies that have filled the modern technoscientific imaginary, in which the highlight goes to a certain notion of �information� that is understood as a process in which the complex becomes simple and malleable. This is a notion that reveals the transitivity between computer science and molecular biology (see Gomart 2007). This also brings us to the fashion after which a large part of that imaginary takes on the transference between that which we know and that which we can do, knowledge and power, body and city. Decon , on the other hand, shows us how Mondrian's dream (the man from the studio-laboratory) epitomizes the modern dream: to decompose nature to the marrow, to reconstruct it entirely, to recompose the city, the polis, according to the results of the adventure. And it shows us this by the means of a re-contextualization of Mondrian's work�his �art of destruction� (Blotkamp, 2001)�that is achieved by the intervention of Derrida's deconstruction, which, to a certain extent, is but an expansion on Heidegger's concept of Destruktion (see Cumming, 2001). Despite the fact that the clout of Derrida's deconstruction concept lies in the sheer impossibility of ultimately defining it, one of its stronger meanings is found in that movement that makes visible all the conditions of artifice, of the construction, of all the motionless evidence, of all the grounding, of all that is natural (as if the order of the grounding was the order of the natural). Actually, in a famous explication of deconstruction, Derrida makes use of a double process, of reduction and reinscription (1971: 41�42; 1972: 4�6). If the reading of a text should be made according to a reduction and a reinscription process, that movement, as I've characterised it, that experience to be more precise, echoes without a shadow of a doubt the protocols of a reading that we can identify in biotechnologies, or in the impossibility (which is an expression with blatant Derridian traits) that they bring about. It is this impossibility, in which the natural grounding finds radically its instability, that we detect the emergence of the territory colonised by biotechnologies. They take place within that which Gilles Deleuze, in his commentary to Michel Foucault (1998 [1986]: 167�179), calls one of the form-forces, the episteme of the present: the unlimited finite, where beings have no perfect form or an essential opacity, and in which an infinitude of beings can emerge from the four bases which constitute a molecule, dna. Which means, if we bring to the fore still another meaning of deconstruction, a world in which the reduction to the finite of the fully mapped genome puts us in the unlimited reinscriptions of the living. Sharply come to mind the words of Rimbaud, the visionary, which Deleuze shrewdly quotes (1998: 179): L'homme de l' avenir est charg� des animaux. [The man to come will be in charge of animals]. To reduce and recompose or reinscribe nature and, with it, the polis: behold the utopia (a dystopia, eventually) which Mondrian would attain. To reduce or reinscribe nature and, with it, the polis: behold the utopia (a dystopia, eventually) which biotechnologies will eventually attain. Where the latter are concerned, we are full centre in a �biosocial� context, to use a Paul Rabinow expression (1996). A nature fully known and replicated by the technical will become artificial, so that culture is eminently natural, given the evolution implications in the suggested processes of techno-selection. Concurrently, the deconstruction of the nature-nurture conundrum will become perceptible though the use of these techno-selective processes. Therefore, the polis too can be recomposed according to a new model which Rabinow calls �post-disciplinary�: the risk can no longer be considered singularly or (better still) anthropologically, but it will rather be evaluated and monitorized epidemiologically. This evaluation and monitoring will be carried out through the �composition of impersonal �factors� that make risks probable� (Rabinow, 1996: 100). Rabinow's expression is, in this aspect, very symptomatic: we will be before a systematic use of �epidemiological social-tracking methods� (id.: 101). An epidemiological evaluation sustained by genetic screening forms that became immediately eligible and even desirable as soon after the human genome was mapped. Thus, Marta de Menezes' work proliferates its own meaning in this continuum, which unfolds the aesthetical and the social modernism of Mondrian, the deconstruction as a process of reduction and reinscription, and the biotechnologies that unrelentingly echo the reduction and reinscription work on the �Book of Nature�, that figuration of the indomitable and the unwritable par excellence. However, the operability of deconstruction can still be thought in other terms, on a different plane. Decon promotes, both explicitly and implicitly, a deconstructive exercise of the art/science conundrum. How is this done? Not only through the continuity that is drawn up between Mondrian's aesthetical and social project and the forms of reconstruction of the living that biotechnologies allow through the mediator that deconstruction offers them, but also through the reinscription of the art/science conundrum that the very experience of deconstruction allows. The laboratory subject matter is redefined. The opposition, and hierarchy, art/science becomes unstable thanks to the presence of the artist in the laboratory, and her reappropriation of laboratorial techniques. Hence, the �incision��Derrida's �diff�rance��between art and science is recognisable. This reappropriation is done through a movement that brings the non-representational dimension of the laboratorial techniques to the interior of the task of the artist. If Decon is something that stands for something else, one of its most recognisable Derridian dimensions is found however in the way that the non-representational of contemporary technoscience is reinscribed in the installation and overwrites the very notion of representation: an art that lives and dies in situ: an art that could only be defined by its procedures and that relinquishes, in due course, all representation: an exercise, as it were, of iconoclasty belated in time. This reappropriation of technoscience and its non-representational qualities is also the expression of what Alfred Gell consecrated in his expression �enchantment� (1999). Art is re-enchanted by its laboratorial reinscription. After that historical process in which art surrendered its aura and came closer to the technical, a process that, ironically and paradoxically, corresponded to a new enchantment, after the exhaustion of the modern adventure, art radicalised progressively that approach to the technical, and now takes further steps into the territories of the mirific in which biotechnologies are found contemporarily. We are, if we so wish, before a process of displacing borders, of making unstable the senses that have meaningful historical roots but which, because they approached biotechnologies, were given an unexpected breath of fresh air: it co-opts the instrumental and symbolic �power� of the biotechnological enchantment. The efficiency and the danger of such a displacement lies in the enchanted features that are inscribed in the biotechnologies: in the confrontation with a barely glimpsed world in which the fluidification of the �natural types� has become the impossibility of the present and its transgression.
Coimbra, January 2008
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