Performance Artist Ólafsdóttir Stefanía

Dear BioDaddy, Who(’s)e Home?

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Yksivuotinen

‘Dear BioDaddy,’ is an extensive performance series confronting the complexities of Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART), particularly sperm donation, its violent histories and unexpected consequences, geographically focussing on Scandinavia. As a TechnoChild (born via ART), the artist themselves is entangled in the biopolitical webs of these realities and curate a performance space to encounter and embrace the paradoxes that manifest in ideas of the family. In a call for alternative and expanded kinship models they seek new parameters to define who and how to love. These social and political explorations exist in parallel performance actions are carried out off-stage as ecologically concerned pilgrimages in the form of extended walking or rowing performances, crossing geographical borders between land and water. This research topic asks questions about the relationship between gender and nationhood, two parallels to biological inheritance, a topic the artist will delve deeper into. The work is concerned with community building based on technological commonality and home-making in a beyond-human world. The artist attempts to inhabit and make a home in the paradoxical spaces of their own identity and as they journey deeper into the construct of the family they begin to become reorientated towards the home. The main objectives of this work are to educate the public about the often unacknowledged impact of reproductive technologies and lives of people born through these procedures; To create a community for people born through such methods, to gather and share their experiences, ease isolation and explore community-making together; Challenge heteronormative ideals of the family; Question the relationship between biology, identity, gender and nationhood; Explore permeable and fluid borders in their feminised and colonial frames on personal and transpersonal levels; Create the performance ‘Dear BioDaddy, Who(’s)e Home?’ to be staged in Finland, Iceland and Denmark.