Mary Maggic’s research on hormones starts in 2015 with Open Source Estrogen, a collaborative project developing diy protocols for synthesizing estrogen from accessible materials and environments. By hacking hormones Mary Maggic is also hacking their symbolic meanings: molecules are everywhere, managing them means controlling every aspect of life, even gender construction and planet alteration. Opening up a hole into the white cis biohacking scene, Maggic brings to the spot the experiences of trans, non binary and gender non conforming people to implement a queer resistance into the normative context of medical institutions. Biohacking turns out as freak science, public amateurism, speculative fiction materially spread through workshopology, performance, installation and documentary film.

Art practice and biotechnological experimentation meet each other in the public space, as Maggic practices are tied up to public participation and collective sharing. Each project is an open source platform for dissident knowledge and socio-political excavation: from extracting estrogen from your own urine in a collective kind-of-witchy ritual (Molecular Queering Agency) to bringing around a portable Estrofem!Lab, Maggic recovers cyberfeminist heritage and xenofeminist strategies to rethink everyday use of information and biotechnologies as community-oriented, encouraging the desire for self-discovery. Biological sabotage starts with one’s own body.

From 2015 you started Open Source Estrogen, a collaborative interdisciplinary project on engaging with hormones and diy protocols as queer resistance to heteronormative pharmaceutical and medical institutions. The project also comes with a Manifesto. How did your research on hormones develop over the years?

When I started Open Source Estrogen, it was very much about creating a low-cost accessible protocol for synthesizing your own estrogen. Although I never achieved this, the project continued to grow and evolve into a theoretical framework for thinking and acting from the perspective of molecules and their bio political presence in every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat, the products we buy, to how our gender categories are constructed and policed, to how the planet has been chemically altered. So the manifesto actually came much later around 2018 after I had already worked collaboratively in many different spaces and temporalities, hacking hormones and hacking their symbolic meanings. It’s actually a great example of how theory and practice co-evolve together through iterative and collective experimentation.

Your practice try to open the field of biohacking to different kinds of subjectivities like non-binary, trans or gender non conforming people. How was your first encounter with the biohacking scene and community? And what can be considered biohacking?

Biohacking is a super broad field. But when I first got into the US scene in 2013, it was actually very narrowly defined. It had the language of democratizing science for the benefit of all, but much of this democratization happened within cis white privileged spaces, or the language had been co-opted into academic and corporate spheres. When I got into the Hackteria open source biological art network, then the definitions made a lot more sense to me. For Hackteria, biohacking isn’t inherently progressive or techno-utopian, but is as ancient and accessible as fermenting wine or cheese in your kitchen. There’s also this collaborative spirit of play and sharing what you’ve geeked on lately, it’s a kind of co-generative experience that can’t be assimilated into utility or profit. Like group alchemy. Or garage jam sessions.

If someone wants to approach diy self-experimentation for the first time, what kind of advice would you give?

Learn from communities that are working with similar kinds of experimentation.

One of the peculiarities of your research is bringing artistic inquiry outside studio-making through public workshops like Estrofem! Lab or Molecular Queering Agency. What aims revolve around public amateurism? And how can it contribute to redefine not just artistic practice but even promote public participation and self-knowledge?

I guess from the collective gatherings in the Hackteria network, I realized that the way I learn and research is by experimenting and prototyping on the collective level, which is very much in the ethos of public amateurism. Of course I still do reading, writing and physical movement as an individual way of researching, but I find that when you’re called upon to imagine new worlds, which is the primary challenge of today’s industrial ruin, this can only be done on a collective level. Because we must stay entangled in order to transform. In my experience working with participants whether its hacking hormones or performing a urine worshipping ritual, public amateurism is always the first step in the process of world-building because it demystifies what is already all around you: hormones, toxicities, gender constructs, and capitalist-colonial regimes of truth. After we have collapsed the old world and its fragile notions, then we can start to claim new narratives.

The Internet offered us a way to subvert the hierarchy of knowledge sharing and production; now we live in uncertain ages threatened by disinformation, trolls, fake news, and related problems like big data used for profiling and for AI instruction. Cyberfeminism was also one of the rare counter-movements that attempted to reframe technology uses. As I guess is a big influence in your work, how can we rethink collective knowledge access and sharing in a disobedient collaborative way?

What’s interesting about Cyberfeminism is that it came around when the internet signaled the end to privacy as we know it. Nowadays, the internet is the end to truth as we know it. But I think Cyberfeminism and the more recent Xenofeminism offer a way of thinking that positions technologies as inseparable from the material realities that underwrite them. Like knowledge as points of power, technologies are often times the tools and discourses of capitalist construction and capitalist alienation. In the Aliens in Green, a tactical theatre group I collaborate with, we could call these “xeno-forces” or “xeno-powers.” So one strategy that I’ve been trying to articulate in my practice, is a performance-based strategy that appropriates these very alienations in order to reframe and transform them.

Environmental toxicity is another key concept in your research, such as in Estroworld. How does the concept of Estroworld reflect on the contemporary toxic ecological situation and consumerist culture?

I created the concept of the Estroworld because I needed a word to describe both our current state of planetary ruin and molecular colonizations and also this regime of purity and purity politics that trap us from finding a way out. Purity at its core is excluding or denying the porosity and inter-permeability of our ways of being and becoming. It is the source of all our binary constructs, female/male, nature/culture, body/mind, animal/human, abnormal/normal etc. But all of these things are inseparable. Not only inseparable but also changeable through their co-relations. That’s what toxicities and their queering potential have been telling us along, that the body has never been a sovereign object. So, as a strategy of care and collective survival in the Estroworld, we must resist categories of purity!

Any future project you’re working on right now?

I’m actually trying to do a project about the Olympics, but more broadly about these trans-humanist fantasies of physical perfection, fitness and optimization. I’m really interested in how bodies are measured and categorized in the realm of competitive sports, because I myself have been trained as a competitive wrestler in both female and male categories although I identify as non-binary. So in this project, I am designing human-powered exercise machines that supply electricity to rotating bioreactors of SCOBY, symbiotic cultures of bacteria yeast found in kombucha. The idea is to train together with the industrialized non-human to achieve this impossible fantasy of post-natural optimization.