ANNA PASTOR

    WeAreOne, (2021-ongoing) draws on the idea that what we perceive as individual organisms are, in fact, complex communities of living entities. The work resonates with Lynn Margulis’s understanding of symbiosis and the holobiont, as well as with philosophical approaches to multiplicity developed by thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. From these perspectives, life is not composed of isolated entities but of heterogeneous systems that continuously interact, transform, and become entangled with one another.

    This understanding also finds a conceptual resonance in David Bohm’s theory of the implicate order, in which the apparent separation of things emerges from a deeper, interconnected reality. It echoes, in a different register, Buddhist concepts of non-duality and interdependence, which question the existence of autonomous, self-sufficient entities and emphasise the relational nature of existence.

    The photographic series WeAreOne records Petri dishes cultivated as part of the Interser research project, developed with the support of the Department of Physiology, Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Alicante and the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Miguel Hernández University. Microbial traces are collected before and after different forms of interaction and cultivated to reveal the transformations produced through contact.

    By making these invisible exchanges visible, WeAreOne explores the boundaries between individual and collective, self and other, and considers contact not as an encounter between already separate entities, but as a process through which bodies and identities are continually transformed.

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