Kathy as Bowie (2015)
Kathy as Bowie (2015). Exchange project with David Bowie.
Conceived by: Kathy High
Photography: Eleanor Goldsmith
Makeup: Jeanna DiPaolo
Kathy as Bowie (2015)
Attempted exchange project with David Bowie
Kathy As Bowie is a performative piece about taking on someone else’s identity through sharing their gut microbiome via a Fecal Microbial Transplantation. Photographs were offered to David Bowie in exchange for a poop sample. The offer was never completed as Bowie died in 2016.
Looking at research in fecal microbial transplants and gut microbiomes to better understand the important function of bacteria in our bodies, this project embraces metaphors of interspecies love. As a patient with Crohn’s disease, High’s interest in gut microbiota starts with her own body.
“As I fantasized of my FMT with Bowie’s poop, I likened my fecal microbial transplantation to an organ transplant. And as such, I believed that more than a mere organ would be exchanged—once transplanted, perhaps the fecal essence of the donor would be taken up by the recipient. What does one’s gut microbiota hold in its totality? What is passed between cells? What is transferred with that FMT? I might have become a bit of Bowie. (Now I can’t imagine anyone else’s poop inside me.)”
—excerpt from “Ways In?: Processing Messages Received,” by Kathy High in PUBLIC: The Welter of Being: Interspecies Communication and the Expanded Mind, eds. Meredith Tromble and Patricia Olynyk, June 2019.
