Growing Affinity

Growing Affinity is a research-creation thesis dissecting how transfeminine bodies are commodified, consumed, and made disposable within material culture, and how a sculptural practice with slaughterhouse-derived biopolymer, gelatin, can metabolize that condition into something else. Working at Concordia's Speculative Life Biolab, I render gelatin from animal remains and cast it into semi-living sculptures, the Dolls, that dry, weep, colonize, and decay under gallery conditions. The thesis develops the “Affective Metabolic Pathway” (AMP), an orientation that courses through five material stages, extraction, clarification, concentration, recomposition, and incarnation, and holds two senses of affect at once: the pressing intensity of harm, and the affection nurtured through surviving it together. AMP is offered as a description of metabolic processes already underway, what I name metabolic solidarity, rather than as a therapeutic narrative. Across the exhibition Panacea (Espace Transmission, 2026), its counterpart Oscillation (Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2025), and the DEMO69 publication, I test what AMP can and cannot account for when the work meets bodies, breath, and community. The panacea offered here is a material practice of affection, not a cure for otherness.