Cristina Dezi

Fem_Lab Catalunya-Austria Exchange Grant

December 2023

Christie is a queer artist and designer. Through a feminist critique she experiments on biomateriality and wearables by intersecting textile innovation, costume design, biohacking and sextech. Her artistic exploration of (trans)feminist activism and hacker culture is expressed through interactive and performative aesthetics to inspire and provoke debate and critical reflection on taboos and stigma related to sexuality, pleasure and hybrid identities. She has studied fashion design at Istituto Marangoni (Milan/London), experimental cinema at BAU (Barcelona), and has completed the Fabricademy Barcelona (IAAC) programme on biology, digital fabrication and wearable technology. She has also specialised in sextech through the Sextech School by Bryony Cole.

Since 2015, she has been working as a freelance designer in costume, wearable technology and bioart, as well as a researcher and workshop organizer with Bruixes-Lab. She has participated in artistic and research residencies, such as *FEMLab Residency (Hangar Barcelona and Mz Baltazar’s Lab, Vienna)**, and has exhibited projects at events such as Maker Faire Bilbao and Future Material Bank (Jan van Eyck Academy). With Giulia Tomasello she co-founded Bruixes_Lab, a nomadic laboratory where biohacking and witchcraft rituals are performed to create speculative scenarios about pleasure and experimenting with DIY sensor circuits to hack the experience of arousal and decentralise the normative binaries of sexuality and bodies.They participated in TTT Conference in Malta, led workshops in Observatorio del Placer in BCN, Ars Elektronika in Linz, MU Hybrid Art House in Eindhoven, III Instrument Inventors in the Hague and much more.

The project developed during the residency is part of an ongoing series of speculative research conducted by neuX, a futuristic interactive lab exploring pleasure and sexuality through a post-human, performative, and transfeminist lens. Within this framework, sci-fi erotic narratives, cyborg skins, and biomateriality intertwine with natural landscapes and dystopian scenarios.

This chapter focuses on the speculative design and research of a wearable sensory bio-textile, which draws on surrounding natural elements and bodily fluids to generate activist frequencies. The aim is to establish a symbiotic connection between the human body, its fluids, and the environment, enabling an active and visceral form of listening to the events and transformations taking place in and around us—through climatic, social, and political shifts. The textile is composed of biocircuits made from bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood, and acts as an interactive wearable synthesiser that channels human and non-human, internal and external sounds. Each natural or bodily change directly influences the emitted frequencies, generating activist noise that initiates a performance or conversation addressing today’s pressing issues.