The maternal side of M.’s family – M. is a fictional character who I’ve positioned in a Part 1 of this project, conducted before the DNA ancestry test result came through – had, in the near past, at least, stemmed from a hill tribe in S.E. Asia, a people who are often without citizenship.
The Ancestry Traveller project is my second meeting with high-tech sequencing and reading genetic information. In my synthetic motherhood project, I have been co-working with a forensic lab to predict the future look of my potential offspring. Ancestry testing allows us to do something opposite, to read the past (at least to a certain extent).
It's a fascinating creative opportunity being one of the 12 artists involved in the scientific and artistic aspects of the Ancestry Traveller workshops produced by the i3S team and Luisa Pereira, a Population Geneticist and the group leader on Genetic Diversity at the University of Porto.
