Johannes Paul Raether

What does it mean for someone to know that they were conceived by anonymously donated eggs or sperm? To what extent do genetic relationships and kinship determine a sense of identity, belonging, and attachment to family members? With his ›Transformella‹­ lifeline, Johannes Paul Raether has created alien-­like figures that respond with new concepts of reproduction and the family to an era in which tech­nology, notions about the body and gender are diverging. The being Trans­formella malor (short Transformalor) appears as the ›surrogate mother of a possible future‹ and analyses how humans and machines themselves produce new life in the present era of global, digital and biological produc­tion chains. Visitors become part of Transformalor’s tribe and together they navigate territories of normativity — everyday and commercial spaces that reflect how today reproduction is em­bedded in a global network of industrial production.