The work is a collaboration between the artist duo ella hebendanz (DE) and pamela varela (MX). It was born as an attempt to investigate the link between their roots and create decolonial lines of exchange. The scientific collaboration took place with Joris Koene (NL), a biologist researching hermaphroditic snails, which inspired us to follow the story of Hermaphroditus—the child of Hermes and Aphrodite—a being with both female and male attributes who metaphorically brought to the work the queerifying of binarisms it portrays. The soundscape was created by Concepción Huerta (MX).

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        We follow threads of Greek mythology to discover how these archetypes still impact our current belief systems, while uncovering the deeply gendered but also queer aspects of these stories. Gender fluidity and sexual pleasure travel through the narrative via the fluids of the body and the water of the sea, to eventually spiral into a multitude of viewpoints— attempting to decolonize and depatriarcalize the single-lens way science has been produced, while self-exploring our bodies as an act of reclaiming and reappropriation.



We use cunt to refer to vulva while reappropriating the swear word. Count means to acknowledge, to tell a story, and to count numbers, so it links to computation. The O alludes to the big O, which refers to the orgasm but is also an algorithmical term. The circle is a hypnotic shape. re-c(O)unting encompasses the stories to be retold, the cunts to be acknowledged, computation as a field to be reclaimed, and the altered states to be experienced.

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       We started this project by attempting to investigate “the orgasm as an altered state”. From then on, we navigated many routes and had a specific interest in psychedelia as a healing state of the body-mind-spirit, which in this first chapter was represented by the spiral of the hermaphroditic snail’s shell. Looking into our roots, we saw the connection between the European explorers who went to the Americas to research the land and the colonial, violent similarities to the European scientists who researched the female-assigned body. It is outrageous that lands, plants and our bodies are named after cis-white-European men. We started this project to share and dismantle this territorial and patriarchal approach in knowledge production. 

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        In 2023, we won the Bio Art and Design (BAD) Award and collaborated with Joris Koene, a scientist from the Free University of Amsterdam specialized on hermaphroditic snails, animals that have the capacity to change their sex from male to female and viceversa in different moments. From then on, we joined our researches and, for this first chapter, created a narrative together. This collaboration gave us access to the laboratory, a space where with Joris, a European man-identifying scientist as an ally, we could regain agency in the exploration of our own bodies. We took Joris’ research in a metaphoric way and followed the story of Hermaphroditus, the intersex child of Hermes and Aphrodite, and looked into Greek mythology to explore gendered societal archetypes. We navigated untold stories of knowledge production in connection to the female body and the Americas, by focusing on analyzing bodily fluids and to create a narrative thread. Pleasure and the orgasm are the opening to the trip. The holes of our bodies are our connection to the cosmos. The spiral of the snail is the magickal vortex in which everything revolves and where binarisms queerify.