Symbiosis and Symbiogenesis

[natacha]

A long time ago I really got caught by the reading of L’univers Bactériel: les nouveaux rapports de l’homme et de la nature, a French translation of Microcosmos, four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors *

In 2016 Symbiosis was the topic of Hack the Earth festival in Calafou. Women who gathered there developed very useful practice and theorical reflection about Intra-actiones toxicas: Laura Benitez, micro-organismos symbioticos: Gynepunk , and many more actions and interactions materialising at this moment a transversal relation to this issue.

This resonates very much with my concerns, for a long time reading and re reading Margulis, I was fascinated by the idea of symbiosis,

Her systemic explanation, is strangely extremely familiar to me, and I was playing with the idea that I was bearing inside each cell all the history of the universe was a clear appeal to merge to other states of materiality.

I tried to understand and make a live visualization of the explanations Lynn Margulis was giving, I was completely alone with this project, and although a french art center proposed to support it became quickly impossible to make it happen there.

Lynn Margulis has left us in 2011 she has been defending her theories all her life and has transformed the history of evolution imposing the principle of their networked symbiotic alliances, interdependance and cooperation upon multiple organisms.

It took time for me to be able to understand that it was the feminist understanding that attached my interest to Lynn Margulis explanations, about interdepen-danse and cooperation of multiple organism engaged into symbiosis exchanges.

*(Lynn Margulis et Dorion Sagan, trad. de l’anglais par Gérard Blanc, Anne de Beer, préf. Lewis Thomas, Réédité au Seuil, coll. « Points Sciences » en 2002 , L’univers bactériel: les nouveaux rapports de l’homme et de la nature « Microcosmos, four billion years of evolution from our microbial ancestors », Paris, Albin Michel, coll. « « Sciences d’aujourd’hui » », 1989 1re éd. en anglais chez HarperCollins en 1987, 333 p. ISBN 2-226-03805-1)

Next step and proposition engage our bacterial relations in coopération.

Explore the idea of network symbiosis

[natacha]

symbiose_caracteristiques_1-3.pdf (1.1 MB)

Dans symbiose, le microcosme est vu comme un super organisme qui évolue au travers des êtres humains.

La récupération d’une information provenant d’une autre bactérie se fait sous la forme de contamination, ce qui met la cellule hôte en danger avec un gros pourcentage de mortalité à ce moment. Mais celles qui survivent acquièrent des capacités supplémentaires.

[natacha]

This reading today must inform that thread:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04102-4

Then, in 1969, a team studying immunity in pregnant people detected white blood cells that contained the Y chromosome in the blood of individuals who would eventually give birth to boys1. For more than two decades, it was presumed that these microchimeric cells were a temporary feature of pregnancy. It wasn’t until 1993 that geneticist Diana Bianchi found cells with Y chromosomes in women who had given birth to sons between one and 27 years earlier2.

This finding overturned the dogma that children inherit genes from their parents and never the other way around — these transferred fetal cells move through the family tree, travelling ‘backwards in time’ from children to their mothers. Bianchi and others would go on to show that these cells have remarkable regenerative properties — promoting wound healing in mothers by transforming into blood vessels or skin cells.

[how]

So long for “progress” and “filiation”. We’re all in a reciprocity bath.