A Chimera is a mythological Greek figure, recognisable in its disparate parts but constituting an impossible whole. Traditionally, formed by the distinct parts of a goat, a lion and a snake but inevitably bringing together any number of parts to form a functional organism. We will summon the figure of the chimera as a reflection and even tentative explanation or companion for the composite, multiple, and often contradictory forces which reside within us. Conceptually, chimeras are not only the gathering of multiple entities housed within one living organism but a chimera also is a notion that has become synonymous with the many phenomena that resist definition or doggedly rest outside that which is graspable. We see the notion turn up in maths – chimeric states are self-organised spatio-temporal patterns of co-existing coherence and incoherence but also in sound experiments of chimerisation and genetic biology.
The impossible is not opposed to the real, the impossible composes with the real and promises a trans*futurism of the wildly imaginative. Chimeras do not need to synthesise but can hold multiple positions at once and in this sense become a socio-political tool to account for ways in which conceptions and manifestations of the self are constituted by divergent positions within bodies, groups and social constructions. Drawing on phenomenological movement practices, theory, alongside building and unbuilding with invited materials we will stage the appearance of contemporary chimeric bodies and call them names that make them live.
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