Returning to the Language of Love: Interview with Mary Maggic

Mary Maggic, Open Source Estrogen, c. 2015 
 

By GRACE PALMER June 23, 2025

‘We must return to the language of love’. These final words shared by Mary Maggic in our interview have long stayed with me. In a world plagued by violence, hatred, disconnection, and isolation, Maggic’s work aims to reconnect us all—to each other, to our bodies, and to the land. First encountering their work through their video-performance Housewives Making Drugs, I was struck by the radical and bold nature of their Xeno-feminist practice (https://maggic.ooo/About). Challenging deep-rooted ideas of body sovereignty, hormonal biopolitics, and environmental exploitation, Maggic confronts the boundaries of both art and science. They offer a new way of thinking, being, acting, and engaging with the world, right down to the molecular level. I spoke with Maggic about their artistic process of biohacking, the importance of community practices, and the urgent need to ‘return to the language of love.’

Palmer: How did you become interested in using art as a medium to explore hormone biopolitics? Where did that intersection between science and art begin for you, and how has it developed over your career?

Maggic: I think my predilection for art and biology started very early, in my teenage years, and then continued to my Bachelor studies when I studied art and biology as a combined degree. For one of our final projects, I had to figure out a way to combine the two disciplines; naturally, that led me to biohacking. Back in 2013, biohacking was a relatively new movement. I was finding out the artists who are part of the movement and how fields like synthetic biology were changing. That went on until 2015, travelling around the world and looking at Community Bio Labs, and the democratization of science. I thought it was super radical. People were doing at the grassroots level.

When I entered MIT, I started at the Media Lab, where I met this Canadian artist who was trying to produce birth control pills. When I joined the project, I decided to just include estrogen, to focus on one molecule. This opened up a whole Pandora's box of biopolitics, because how did estrogen get codified as female? How did the history of hormone production come into place? Seeing all the different motivations that you can have with biohacking, and then being in this environment where I wanted to rebel against this male-centric environment. That's how the Open Source Estrogen project started.

Palmer: I think your research project, Open Source Estrogen, is endlessly fascinating, especially through confronting pervasive biopolitical hormonal management. What have you uncovered through your research into biohacking? Have you begun to see real-world applications of the Xeno solidarities your research project discusses?

Maggic: In the beginning, it was a very technical project because we were figuring out how to hack the invisible, but it's all pervasive, so we relied on scientific protocols. I went on several art science residencies to be in this collaborative interdisciplinary environment.

I felt that the environment was the best way to produce these protocols because if I had worked only with scientists, it would be a completely different project. That was the main methodology in the beginning, alongside considering different strategies and seeing what protocols arise. One protocol, the urine hormone extraction protocol, is my most frequently used in the workshops’ participatory performances.

Feminist discourse gives us a way to build out of the alienation rather than something that we need to barricade ourselves from. I see a lot of discourse being written, but I think it's a different perspective when you turn it into practice. I see it with the punk movements like the Trans Hack feminists who came out of California. I see it with some individual artists like the Slovenian artist Maja Smrekar, looking at plant and animal hybridity research.

Mary Maggic, Estrofem! Lab (YES-HER Yeast Lab), c. 2016, Mobile lab with mixed media, 42 x 28 x 15cm, Installed at Raumschiff Gallery, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria 

Palmer: Your workshopologies enable you to engage with a wider community in these practices, whereas there are still barriers to entry with this sort of Xeno feminist practice that you're engaging with.

Maggic: My work exists in these spaces and temporal experiences that can only happen through collectivity. I think the space of collectivity is a medium. You're holding space for people's emotions, for other people's activities, for people's Cosmo-visions, and also vulnerabilities. So I see that as much a medium as painting or sculpting.

My workshops have become more about embodiments. When you're too much in the mind, everything becomes disembodied, like a lot of scientific knowledge is very disembodied. I think that's why working with somatic intelligence or working with the vulnerabilities that arise, the feelings that you can perceive in the body, is much more impactful.

I wish they would teach this in art schools, in addition to painting, sculpting and other disciplines. I think workshopology breaks down the barrier between the artist and the public, and you start to imagine together. It’s that space of learning and togetherness that's very special.

Palmer: You're talking about workshopology as a collective integrated model experience. Do you find that it can traverse that hegemonic system of patriarchal dominance, or the narratives perpetuated in artistic practices, by using the sort of communal focus? Do you think that it escapes the framework that has informed art history?

Maggic: I think so. All the systems we have, the modern scientific systems, education, and the university systems, come from a colonial framework. The more we can educate each other and be communal together outside of these systems, the more we're able to decolonize ourselves. But it's so hard. Deconditioning is such a deep process because I have to think about how colonialism impacts the way I sit in my chair, the way I breathe, the way I rest, the way I go out into nature.

We need to have these conversations, even though they're they can be very uncomfortable. I think it's important to have space for these conversations and to talk about how we are part of the system. Workshopology allows us to pick up these subtle energies between people and to have a space for these discussions.

Palmer: You talk about your practice as a socio-political excavation. Is your process concerned with digging up public imaginaries and exposing them, or does excavation for you predicate on the need for replacement and change?

Maggic: I think that the excavation has gone through many different layers over time. In the beginning, I was excavating the barriers of science: how do we get access to laboratory equipment, to resources, to knowledge? Then the excavation became about molecules and biopolitics. And then it just got deeper and deeper, the colonial frameworks, the binary frameworks, and now we're hitting the emotions, the somatic level, the how we breathe, how we rest, how we care, how we talk about emotions, how we talk about fears. It keeps getting deeper and deeper. I think the excavation just never ends.

Palmer: Your project, Genital(*)Panic, engages in the process of countering the ‘normative’ bodies established in patriarchal capitalism, and an embrace of the non-fixity of the body. In a current climate where disobedient bodies are consistently under threat, how do you think a project like this would help in altering this assumption concerning bodily ‘correctness’?

Maggic: I think the main thing for Genital(*)Panic is that it shows that science is in the business of making fictions. If it is in the business of making fictions, then why can't we, as non-scientists, also produce our own fictions? It's showing that there is a storytelling element about science, but the only difference is that it's a politically and financially sanctioned storytelling. You have all this money going into the creation of these fictions, so there's the power imbalance.

Genital(*)Panic reveals the languages used to construct these fictions. This idea of a body should look like this, and then it has to be policed in this way, and doctors with their authority have to approve of these bodies. It's a speculative project, but I think there is power in how we can imagine alternative worlds, alternative ways of producing knowledge, and alternative ways of expanding the notion of gender.

Mary Maggic, Genital(*) Panic, c. 2019, Multimedia installation, Installed at Mz Baltazars Lab, Vienna.

Palmer: Your fanzine series follows somewhat a trajectory of various elements and natural resources and their interconnection to human bio-molecularity. Do you think that decentring the ‘humanness’ of our molecular system and placing it in correspondence with these natural elements can aid in countering the prevalence of ‘body sovereignty’

Maggic: We did a fanzine-making workshop related to Genital(*)Panic, and it was such a simple exercise. All we did was provide a bunch of magazine and newspaper material. This process of cutting, editing and remixing was very tactile and embodied, but it was a reflection of the mind reconfiguring these concepts, histories, and scientific theories.

The participants created all these different combinations. It was like when scientists are gene editing inside an organ. Then, if the fanzine is the organism and it gets distributed, it's like you're distributing gene libraries, so the knowledge gets shared. I love fanzines as an alternative way of publishing knowledge. For us in the biohacking community, we don't get to publish in scientific journals, so we make our fanzines. Oftentimes, you can throw in Lynn Margulis, you can throw in some Karen Barad: you're remixing knowledge. It's also very anarchistic, you spread it Guerrilla style.

Palmer: The environment is a fundamental aspect explored in your practice, especially in terms of environmental toxicity and the pollution of petrochemicals. Do you think that a re-engagement with nature and its interconnection with the human body will help us to learn more about queering the body?

Maggic: Since 2022, I have started to focus more on working with waste and trash that you find in construction sites and landfills in these heavily polluted or abandoned landscapes. It was a departure from the molecular world and trying to get more macro scales of alienation and alterations of the planet. I started to look at these landscapes as if they were bodily landscapes. If you can imagine having a wound in your body, all of this toxicity leaking, how would you care for this body as if it's your own body? I think that creating this land-based relation is super important because a lot of what these capitalist, industrial, colonial projects do is separate us from the Earth. They separate us from the land, from the ancestry of the land, from the way that our ancestors used to care for the land. This is one of the most powerful tools of colonial capitalism, this way of displacing people from their roots, from their origins, displacing people from nature. We see it now with climate change as well.

Now that I'm working more in these macro-scale site-specific projects, I am better understanding our place in the whole planetary system. I think caring for your body, caring for the body of the planet, is a universal language of love, and that's what I tried to focus on now. As an artist, I felt a duty to reach a more universal perspective. How can we return to the language of love? I think a lot of the violence we see today comes from that place of lovelessness.

Mary Maggic, Plants of the Future, c. 2024, 'Bordering Plants' at Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

Palmer: Are there any upcoming projects that you would like to highlight? What new thing can people look forward to?

Maggic: There is a project that I'm launching this summer, Florestania Im Dritten, in Vienna’s new neighbourhood Village Im Dritten, on June 15^th (florestania.at).  We are collecting plastic waste, and we are going to go through a series of public workshops, transforming the plastic into a plastic forest. Through this plastic forest, we want to sell the artworks and return the money to reforestation initiatives. We will have the workshops all summer, and then the exhibition of the Plastic Forest will happen in September. That's when we're going to do a bunch of fundraising. I'm going to try to get construction companies to give us money for the forest because I think it's appropriate since they are sealing the soil and pouring concrete on the Earth, so it is good for them to give back to the land.

We don't feel connected to nature in these urban environments. We don't need to scale bigger and bigger; we need to scale deeper to change belief systems. We need to change how we relate to the Earth. If we work with the pollution itself and make it into something that gives back to the land, this is a way to transform the wound into something that honours life.

Palmer: Where is the best place that people can find you and your work?

Maggic: I think the best place is Instagram, and I post a lot of updates on my Linktree as well (https://www.instagram.com/marymaggic/)

Palmer: Thank you for chatting with me today.

Maggic: Thank you. WM