Event: Evening with Ana María Gómez López, Larose-Osler Artist in Residence
n of 1
Self-experimentation is a long-standing tradition in which physicians, scientists, and other practitioners test treatments, remedies, and prototypes on themselves, often through “n of 1” trials. As a practice, self-experimentation defies clinical and research protocols by collapsing the researcher and the research subject—an auto-enquiry meant to scrutinize one’s embodied analysis for the benefit of others. In the 21st century, self-experimentation has taken on a broad variety of increasingly mainstream forms, from quantitative self-tracking technologies and personalized medical treatments to DIY biohacking and pharmaceutical human challenge trials. Artists, in turn, also create inventive self-experiments, ranging from corporeal interventions to bio-art and ecological interactions. This presentation examines documents and objects that relate to legacies of self-experimentation at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, as viewed by an artist who carries out body-based, durational work along these lines.
About the speaker
Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator from Cali, Colombia based in Amsterdam. Her practice centers on self-experimentation, definitions of biological life, legacies of utopian thought, and archival research in the history of science, medicine, and technology. Ana María was selected for a 2023 CIFO-Ars Electronica Award, to be exhibited at the Lentos Kunstmuseum. Her work has been shown at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Fonds d’art contemporain Genève, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, V2_Lab for Unstable Media, Rencontres Internationales, and DOK Leipzig. Ana María was a resident artist at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten and has held fellowships at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, International Institute for Social History, and Max Planck Institute for History of Science. She currently teaches at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague