2021 / film
Surrogate, a collaboration with artist and educator Lauren Lee McCarthy, was a meditation on kinship, surrogacy, and parenthood. McCarthy had been thinking about these issues and themes for years. Our email correspondences and virtual conversations over the course of the pandemic forced me to think about my ideas of family and children in a way that upended how I felt and thought about reproductive rights, biosurveillance, and care in a highly digitized hyper connected world.
I ached to love something more than I loved myself was one of the things I felt deeply and wholeheartedly in the process of witnessing McCarthy’s work unfold.
As mentioned, my contributions to her work reside exclusively within the deep, private, and emotionally charged exchanges over the course of many months. Yet the work became so much more than I had imagined and captured within a world that felt wildly fragmented due to the tremendous seismic cultural and scientific shifts. At some points, I felt the work start to push the contours of thought experiment to a physical manifestation of my desires to become a parent and have this experience go beyond abstraction. Whatever minor interventions I made, I view them as mere prompts to her larger, ambitious, and (r)evolutionary artistic process and approach.
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 