PrEP Bread

By: Iván L. Munuera.

In collaboration with: Vivien Rotie + Pablo Saiz. Special thanks to Alex Martin Rod
Location: Spanish Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale.

The 18th Venice Architecture Biennale was curated by Lesley Lokko. The curators of the Spanish Pavilion were Edu Castillo + Manuel Ocaña.

Concept: PrEP, or Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis, has revolutionized bodies and their chemical landscapes. Used to prevent contracting HIV, tenofovir and emtricitabine block the enzyme that HIV needs to replicate, thereby reducing the amount of virus in the body. To enhance their absorption, they should be taken with a light meal, and gluten free bread has been proven effective. The ingredients in the recipe to make a slice of bread to be consumed with PrEP, span vast geographies where politics and ideologies are debated in configuring internal organs, chemical regimes, food ingested, bacteria that live off of air and feed leavening, viruses that coexist with bodies, batteries that charge electronic devices and the electricity grids that power them. In friction with other human and non-human bodies. Recipes that involve material exchanges scattered in the California laboratories where PrEP is manufactures and in the corn fields of Argentina needed for gluten-free flour, fed by gas from Eastern Europe and lithium from the Atacama desert, by oil from Kazakhstan or Libya and by flour processing plants in Navarra, by latex from Thailand and lubricant from Almeria.

Text:

“Artificial Bloom/ Hydroponic skin/ Chemical release/ Synthesize the real/ Plastic surgery/ Social dialect/ Positive results/ Documents of life.” 

Waking up with Sophie. The system of ascending reticular activation (SARA) in my brain begins. SARA is activated with Sophie. My eyes, my ears, my skin receive electric shocks and mobilize my cortex. Thought and perception are switched on. Dopamine, the chemical messenger that regulates my movements, awakens. Norepinephrine, the stress hormone, keeps me alert. Acetylcholine, histamine and serotonin regulate my mood, my attention, my cognitive functions. I am awake. "Siri, turn off the alarm and amp up the volume" I remember Sophie’s concert in Berlin, a weekend on a cheap airline. A carbon footprint of 600 kilograms of carbon dioxide for a couple of days. Siri, SARA and Sophie, my dear morning companions. 

I get up and go to the kitchen. I look at the dough I prepared yesterday: first, 50 grams of potato starch, 250 grams of cornstarch, 200 grams of rice flour and 40 grams of chia seeds. Then, on the side, some warm water, 1 tablespoon of vinegar, 15 grams of fresh yeast, and 10 grams of agave syrup. As I mix it all together I notice how the yeast has been activating, growing, spreading its filaments, those that perhaps once adsorbed soil, waste and manure and that now live in one of the dark cupboards in my kitchen. 

This yeast lives in the air I share with my plants. My body, defined as human, is composed of 96 percent bacteria cells. Bacteria from my environment, from travels, from other bodies. I am others. While I slept, the dough doubled in volume. I see bubbles through the glass container, encapsulations of other landscapes that are also mine, even if I don't see them every day. I pour the dough into the mold and notice the porosity of the amorphous volume that adjusts to the new space. I take a picture of it and select a pink filter. It looks like an internal organ, a mushroom. I upload it to Instagram, #annatsing. I leave it like that, resting while I get dressed. I don’t get many likes.

I go to the doctor. I'm torn between reaffirming my identity or keeping it hidden, flowing with their discourse. The questions are always the same: how do I feel, have I noticed anything different, how is my stomach, how many sexual partners have I had, have they been risky? These questions outline an incomplete biography and geography of my everyday life, where there is no talk about consent or the construction of a dissident body through my performances. I have read Sara Ahmed and Jack Halberstam, C. Riley Snorton and Astrida Neimanis, Brigitte Baptiste and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. Their thoughts come from New York, from London, from Chicago, from Sydney, from Bogotá, from La Paz. I have not met any of them, but all their environments come to me through videos of lectures, podcasts, and the paper of books, produced in the mills of Aragon and Catalonia. But the doctor doesn’t care and gives me a weary look when I talk about it. I know that my body spans a vast geography where politics and ideologies are discussed in my organs, in the pills I take, the food I eat, in the bacteria that float in the air and nourish my yeast, in the organisms that live in my body, in the batteries that charge my devices and the electrical power grids that feed them; in my weekend trips, in the frictions with other bodies, human and non-human. But I don’t want to explain it. Not because I have internalized certain types of censorship (or maybe I have), not because I am ashamed of not being understood or of being looked down upon with contempt or condescension (or maybe I am), but because I am in a hurry. I haven’t had breakfast. They sign the prescription and I go to the pharmacy. I take the PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis).

My chemical regime has changed. PrEP, my blue companion, is as much a part of my life as HIV/AIDS, which first came to public attention in 1981, although it has a longer history, before and after, through cases that were diagnosed in the United States among men who have sex with men. I was born in the era of HIV/AIDS. Distant temporalities run through my body. Before I knew that my affective and sexual politics escaped the heteropatriarchy, I knew that my body was tagged as a possible carrier. At first they called it “the gay cancer” or GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency). My fluids escape from the container of flesh, blood, semen, milk, vaginal fluids, bacteria, excrement, tissue, viruses and microplastics that I answer to in order to be captured in medical, political and social statistics. When PrEP came along, my cognitive system changed. Tenofovir and emtricitabine block the enzyme that HIV needs to replicate, reducing the amount of virus in my body, preventing it from spreading internally. I live in the PrEP era. Thanks to the Spanish healthcare system, PrEP is free in my region. In other countries it is banned. In the United States it costs as much as 2,000 dollars a month. Exclusion is social, it is economic, it is geographical, it is racial, it is cultural. It is corporal. It is intersectional.

I arrive home. To avoid nausea and diarrhea, and to promote digestion and activate the principles of PrEP, I wait to eat it with gluten-free toast. I bake the bread for 15 minutes at 200 degrees, putting some water in a bowl next to it, so that it is always hydrated. I hydrate myself too. After fifteen minutes I remove the water, lower the temperature to 200 degrees and bake for another 30 minutes. I use the grill to golden brown it a little. While I wait for it to cool, I prepare a green tea from Japan. The flour for the bread comes from the extensive corn and rice fields of Latin America, and are processed in Navarra, Valencia and Castilla León. Yeast feeds on my air. Vinegar from Italy. Agave syrup from Mexico. Chia seeds that also arrived here from Latin America. Landscapes that are understood as productive, extractive, devastating. PrEP comes from California, from the Gilead laboratories in Foster City. Pharmaceutical monopolies. Everything is mixed in my oven with the gas that arrives from Eastern Europe and with the oil that moves the ships, planes and trucks that unload the PrEP and the components of my bread near me. Oil extracted in Nigeria, in Mexico, in Libya, in Kazakhstan and in the United States through transnational agreements. My body is scattered across the globe. 

The bread is less elastic because it is gluten-free – but digestion is easier. My mouth embraces the bite of bread with PrEP. My saliva breaks the carbohydrates in the bread into small molecules. The PrEP begins to dissolve in my stomach and to enter my bloodstream. The acidic environment of my stomach absorbs the nutrients from the bread bit by bit, raising the glucose in my blood system. Waves of tenofovir and emtricitabine are transported to my organs and tissues through the liver and lymphatic system, accumulating in my rectum and genital tract. Tonight I go out.

I want to read, but I can’t find anything I feel like reading. The pages of books run up the walls of the room, or exist as PDFs on my computer. I remember where I bought these books, on trips, on boring afternoons, by surprise, out of obligation. Some have been passed on to me. I open TikTok and YouTube. I look at dances, cooking recipes, bio-hegemonic bodies, interiors of capital, bewildered cats. I open a fitness app. I no longer take steroids to gain muscle because of the stress they put on my renal and cardiovascular systems. I used to get them through a network of friends. Now I drink protein shakes made from soy, which comes from Brazil, increasing the devastation of the Amazon and the destruction of the tropical biomass. I no longer go to the gym. They make me choose between showers segregated by a gender binary system that exhausts me and that I don’t recognize.

I open Grindr. I scroll up and down, click on some pictures: “Status: Neg. On PrEP.” I read some random messages and send others to friends in a WhatsApp group: “Going out today?” “Ok.” “11?” “Ok.” I check the flyer. There’s time to sleep. “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness' domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house”. What would José Esteban Muñoz think of PrEP and Grindr? I don’t think it was his queer utopia, seeing the conversations about being masc or fem, about the tyranny of certain bodies and certain skins, about ableism and ageism, the preponderance of binarism in everything, about the absence of consent and conversations about bio-hegemonic health. 

More messages. I call an Uber and keep sending messages. We have already talked about Special K, cocaine and MDMA, produced in laboratories responsible for ecosystem devastation, displacement and the exploitation of indigenous communities, which reach me through a network of disjointed contacts. My neurotransmitters are activated by methylenedioxymethamphetamine. Empathy is released as serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine increase. It also increases dehydration in my body. I drink water. The bottle material, made from petroleum that will take hundreds of years to decompose, releases microplastics into my blood system. The pores of my skin expand, releasing sweat and capturing fluids from other bodies and from the stuffy air of the club. More messages. My phone lights up and vibrates continuously, powered by lithium batteries captured in the Atacama mines. The messages don’t convince me, but I accept them. I return home accompanied by another body.

Conversations about prophylactics. PrEP does not prevent other sexually transmitted diseases. I take out a condom. Discussion and laughter. The texture of the latex, so close to my skin, comes from Hevea Brasiliensis, from the rainforests of Southeast Asia. The water-based lubricant, glycerin and other materials I bought on Amazon, stored in large repositories in Almería and Cádiz. “Siri play Sophie in Spotify”: 

“Lock up the door/ Put the pony on all fours/ Crack down the whip/ Make the pony bite the bit/ Spit on my face/ Put the pony in his place/ I am your toy/ Just a little ponyboy.” 

Spotify does not make public where its servers and data centers are located, but its landscapes are here. My body branches out and reaches them all. My body is decentered and multiplies with the other body, with the other bodies and microorganisms that make us. We exchange some fluids while others are captured in the condom, spilled in the laboratories of California and the cornfields of Argentina, in the gas of eastern Europe and the lithium of the Atacama; in the switchboards of Uber in San Francisco and the assembly plants of my smartphone in China; in the oil of Kazakhstan and Libya, in the paper of books in Catalonia and in the tea of Japan; in the latex of Thailand and the lubricant of Almeria, the flour processing plants of Navarre and the oil that feeds the supply trucks; in the flour of the supermarket next door to my house and in the bacteria-filled air of my kitchen. My nervous system starts to relax. I turn off the light. “Siri, turn down the volume.”