ET IN ARCADIA EGO: ADDRESSING CANCER,
DEATH AND IMMORTALITY USING SCIENCE
Charlotte Jarvis (artist), Information Experience Design,
Royal College of Art, London, U.K.
E-mail:
Hans Clevers (molecular geneticist), Hubrecht Institute,
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Utrecht,
The Netherlands. E-mail:
Vedere
associated with this issue.
Submitted: 30 agosto 2016
Astratto
Charlotte Jarvis has collaborated with Hans Clevers to grow her
own tumor. Here, the authors discuss the project’s aims to examine
mortality and create a dialogue with and about cancer.
Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, 1637–1638, hangs in the Louvre.
The painting depicts four Classical shepherds discovering a
stone monument within an idealized Tuscan landscape. IL
shepherds are reading the engraving Et in Arcadia Ego (“Even
in paradise I am here”). The edifice is a tomb, and the first
person “I” who speaks through the inscription is Death.
Unlike earlier paintings bearing the same inscription [1],
Poussin omits any direct depiction, symbolic or otherwise, Di
Death itself. Death is unrendered yet terribly present. Further-
more, the beatific Classical figures within the paradisiacal set-
ting remind us that Death exists even for perfect beings in a
perfect world. It is not just with us, but part of us.
While we are built to live for about 80 years, our individual
cells have much shorter lifespans. Stem cells allow us to out-
live our constituent parts, replacing lost cells with fresh speci-
mens. Ovviamente, they also eventually wear out. The erosion of
their DNA code causes their numbers to gradually dwindle.
Yet, every once in a while, a specific mutation in their DNA
doesn’t make them weaker, but rather they start dividing more
often, moving around and occupying nearby tissues; they have
become cancer cells.
Our DNA code consists of 3 billion letters (a sequence of G,
UN, T and C). Stem cells require no more than four changes in
this code to turn malignant [2]. Così, the difference between
cancer cells and normal stem cells is minute.
In 1971 then U.S. president Richard Nixon declared a “war
on cancer” [3]. Four and a half decades later, the end of this
war is not in sight. It has been exceedingly challenging to
design drugs that will kill cancer cells, but leave other cells
alone, because malignant tumours are built from our own
cells. Et in arcadia ego, Infatti.
Metaphors, Catharsis and Death (Charlotte)
In 2014, IO (Charlotte) attended the funeral of a friend who
died from kidney cancer at the age of 33. Before his death, IO
discussed the language of cancer at length with Martin, who,
like other patients, was often described as battling or fighting
cancer. These conflict metaphors (as opposed to journeys for
esempio [4]) belie a desire to believe that if every patient
fought hard enough, within him or herself, they would survive.
This is clearly not the case. The image conjured of patients
fighting cancer also, contradictorily, casts cancer as the exter-
nal agent; something alien to be waged war against, so that
dying of cancer becomes both the fault of the patient and the
result of something “other” to their bodies.
I had previously made a number of biological artworks
using cell cultures harvested from my own body, and I became
interested in developing a piece of work that would interrogate
these metaphors, challenge the idea of cancer as “other” to us
and probe my relationship to mortality.
I wrote to Hans Clevers, from the Hubrecht Institute in
Utrecht and asked if he would help me grow a tumour—
something that would be biologically part of me, but grown
outside of my body in a laboratory and ultimately exhibited,
with me, in a gallery. The project would be called Et in
Arcadia Ego and would aim to discuss cancer whilst realizing
a confrontation between me and my own death, in homage to
Poussin’s painting.
The project would not attempt to represent the experience
of cancer; to do so would be insulting to those with the real
authority to speak. Piuttosto, I hoped the project might contribute
to finding new ways of visualizing and thinking about it. IO
hoped that the process of abstracting cancer through a scien-
tific process—of literally removing it from the body and fig-
uratively holding it at a distance—might help to see it more
clearly. Additionally, I have always had a profound fear of
death, which I felt more keenly after Martin died, and if I am
honest I hoped that the project might be in some way cathar-
tic—that it might make me less scared.
I hoped the piece would relate to three bodies of work—art
involving growing and exhibiting cell cultures as pioneered by
Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, art that uses science and data to
discuss cancer (Blood and Bones by Tom Corby and La Cura
by Salvatore Iaconesi for example) and the long tradition of
artists using their own bodies to make personal work with
broader implications (Orlan, Stelarc, Kiera O’Reilly, eccetera.).
It was not without irony that I noted that the process of
producing this work about mortality would necessitate making
small parts of myself immortal [5]—a concept also explored
by Marta De Menezes, who was working on Immortality for
Two at around the same time. Perhaps this is another reason
why cancer can feel like a perverse punch line—sometimes
we die because parts of ourselves fail to.
How to Make Cancer (Hans)
One way researchers are attempting to solve the insidious
enigma of how to treat cancer is to understand the process of
mutation by which stem cells become cancer. When Charlotte
wrote to me (Hans), my group was preparing a paper [6] Quello
would further our understanding of this process by formally
proving that it takes only four DNA mutations to convert a
normal colon stem cell into a full-blown colon cancer cell.
In previous studies, we had developed technology to take a
biopsy of colon tissue from a healthy mouse or human volun-
teer and culture this tissue in a petri dish for long periods. IL
ever-expanding structures created by the colon stem cells-in-a-
dish are termed organoids, a.k.a. “mini-guts” [7].
To introduce defined mutations into the four best-known
colon cancer genes (APC, P53, KRAS and SMAD4), we made
use of groundbreaking technology developed by Jennifer
Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier: CRISPR/CAS9 [8].
This technology allows us to introduce the four mutations in a
stepwise fashion into the healthy colon stem cells.
To analyze the effects of the four mutations on the human
colon stem cells, the mutant organoids were transplanted to
mice. Only the organoids with all four mutations exhibited
malignant behavior: they grew in an invasive fashion and
metastasized to distant sites in the mouse body, eventually
leading to its death [9]. In short, my group had successfully
replicated the “natural” process by which healthy cells become
cancer cells.
To a lab-based experimentalist, the cancer problem is just an
intellectual challenge. So, when we turned normal cells into
cancer cells, this carried no emotional charge. Charlotte’s
©2017 ISAST. Published under a Creative Commons Attributions 3.0 Unported (CC BY) licenza.
doi:10.1162/LEON_a_01419 LEONARDO, Vol. 50, No. 2, pag. 197–198, 2017 197
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question made us realize what actually had happened in our
petri dishes. So I agreed to collaborate with her and replicate
this process on an in vitro colony of her own cells. Whilst the
mutations we would carry out would be common to all gut
cancer, the cells themselves, having derived from Charlotte’s
body, would be distinct to her and as such potentially lethal to
Charlotte, but harmless to anyone else.
Art and Ethics (Charlotte)
In order to initiate the project, we needed a sample of my
(Charlotte’s) colon tissue. Questo, Tuttavia, proved harder than
anticipated. Like all medical procedures, rectoscopy carries
with it an (extremely small) associated risk, and for over a
year I could not find a clinic willing to participate. This hesi-
tance on the part of various medical institutions to carry out a
low-risk procedure in the absence of medical need is under-
standable. Tuttavia, the ethics become less straightforward
when one considers that many of the same clinics were willing
to carry out extensive cosmetic surgeries with considerably
more associated risk and an equal absence of medical need.
Given the ease with which I could have booked any number
of cosmetic procedures, it appeared that the objections I faced
to the rectoscopy were less about the associated risk of me
collecting and using my own cells and more about my reasons
for wanting to do so, failing to conform to social norms regard-
ing what I should want to do with parts of my own body. Questo
part of the project was unexpected and can be viewed within
the context of other pieces of art and writing that further
explore medical ethics in relation to biological art [10].
Eventually, a sympathetic doctor was found through connec-
tions in Paris who agreed to do the procedure as a private con-
sultation. The sample was taken and shipped to Utrecht, Dove
Hans’s lab initiated the seven-month process of mutating my
healthy colon cells into cancer just in time for an exhibition at
MU in Eindhoven.
Defeat, of a Sort (Charlotte)
The installation at MU, and later at Kapelica in Ljubljana,
comprised two sets connected by a corridor. The first was a
waiting room (see supplementary material), or more accurate-
ly, the trope of a waiting room. Screens showed abstract
snippets of medical procedures, scientific experiments and
disembodied parts of a waiting patient. Corkboards displayed
documents including private emails, rectoscopy photos, lab
imagery and sketchbook pages. During the exhibition, IO
(Charlotte) sat in this space, dressed in surgical gown, waiting.
Down a narrow corridor, the darker second space housed
a spotlit mound of soil. Atop the earth sat a box—entirely
mirrored, inside and out—creating an illusion of infinite space,
within which my cancer sat housed in a petri dish.
This was not the cathartic object I had anticipated: The cells
scare the living shit out of me (Fig. 1). I had thought that the
scientific process would abstract cancer for me; that demystify-
ing it would make it less frightening. It did not. The confronta-
tion I have materialized is not one I have won. Although I
recognize that this defeat at the hands of my own work is a
meaningful, or at least compelling, outcome, I get no enjoy-
ment from performing in the space. I hate being close to the
cells. Although preserved in ethanol, as they are, the cells can-
not harm me, and although I know them to be of my body, Essi
still hold a kind of talismanic power for me. They may not be
alien, but these parts of me remain incomprehensibly terrible.
Fig. 1. Organoids, Et in Arcadia Ego, 2015. Healthy organoids,
left, are structurally organized with single-layer epithelium.
Cancerous organoids, right, are more solid and disorganized.
(© Charlotte Jarvis. Photo Hans Clevers.)
Some time after the project was exhibited, Hans sent me an
email. He said, “I tell the story of our project at scientific meet-
ings and say that you exhibit yourself with your cancer cells.
Colleagues walk up to me and say that examples like these are
eye openers. We do study cancer as an abstraction, but your art
project drives home that the real thing is never far away.”
Poussin made an earlier, arguably less successful version
of Et in Arcadia Ego in 1627. What Poussin decided to change
in the later canvas, and what makes it more persuasive, È
described by art historian Erwin Panofsky as “a contemplative
absorption in the idea of mortality” [11]. The figures in the
second painting are less dramatic: they are calm but resigned,
sequentially describing the process of being confronted with
mortality. One interprets the inscription; another appeals out-
wards bewildered and confused; the woman slouches, hand on
hip in stunned contemplation; and the final figure gazes down,
defeated.
References and Notes
1. For example Guercino’s version painted between 1618 E 1622 featuring
the typical memento mori skull.
2. J. Drost et al., “Sequential cancer mutations in cultured human intestinal stem
cells,” Nature 521 (2015) pag. 43–47.
3. R. Nixon (1971),
avuto accesso 19 agosto 2016.
4. A number of articles and blogs have appeared recently that discuss cancer
metaphors. See M. McCartney, “The Fight Is On: Military Metaphors for
Cancer May Harm Patients,” BMJ 349 (2014) g.5155; M. Gajewski, “May I
take your metaphor?—how we talk about cancer” (2015)
“Do We Need to End the ‘War’ on Cancer?" (2015),
5. Cancer cells are described as immortal because some (but not all) have no
Hayflick Limit (the number of times a cell colony divides before division stops)
due to the presence of an enzyme called telomerase, which maintains the end of
the DNA strand after division.
6. Drost et al. [2] pag. 43–47.
7. A detailed protocol can be found in T. Sato et al., “Single lgr5 Gut Stem
Cells Build Crypt-Villus Structures in vitro without a Stromal Niche,” Nature
459 (2009) pag. 262–265.
8. J.A. Doudna and E. Charpentier, “Genome Editing. The New Frontier of
Genome Engineering with CRISPR-Cas9,” Science 346 (2014) P. 1258096 1–9.
9. Drost et al. [2] pag. 43–47.
10. Per esempio, Gina Czarnecki’s Art and Ethics panel, 2012 and Ionat Zurr
and Oron Catts’s paper “The Unnatural Relations between Artistic Research
and Ethics Committees: An Artist’s Perspective,” published in The Arts and
Ethic, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy.
11. E. Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition”
(1936),
198 Art and Cancer
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