detail of dividing DNA strand with texts by Irigaray and Nietzsche
In Vitro (the perfect wound) plays with an exaggerated gender stratification, between the male (Christ) and female (sex) wounds, so as to re-open the question in relation to current biological premises. A quest to know the body makes of it an experimental site, and turns it into a perverse, quasi-biological science display.
The images of Christ, taken from Italian and Dutch religious paintings of the 14th and 15th centuries, portray a wound that seems difficult to heal in the Western psyche. There is a metaphorical connection to science practices in this imagery, in that Christianity is key to the Western mindset of trained, disciplined, rationalized subjectivity. This is historically the mindset of scientific enquiry, which sacrificed nature to a pseudo-religious obsession with objectivity.
In In Vitro, there is another, invisible wound: the feminine wound. (That is, the feminine as female, because the figure of Christ represents a limit of the feminine located in the male, "as other as truth has been permitted to be," to borrow a Nietzschean phrase.)
The feminine is present here in the transmutation by computer processing of a splitting cell into a labial figure. This is a comment on the complexities of sexual difference in a biological context.