Similar to the way oysters shifted historically, from a key food staple of the working classes, to a fetishised, luxury food item (due to its connections to pearls, its perceived aphrodisiacal qualities and its increasing scarcity due to overfishing) freshwater pearl mussels, or Margaritifera margaritifera are particularly recognized in Austria as very special animals, as wonderfully shown in 2021 at the Heimische Perlengeheimnisse exhibition, organised by the OÖ. Landes-Kultur GmbH. As with most natural species that become fetishised as luxury goods, and also due to the impacts of agriculture, industrialisation, urbanisation and habitat destruction in general, these pearl mussels are now critically endangered. In contrast, the zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha) , while controlled through their long history of existence in the waters of Upper Austria, have become a prolific coloniser in the water systems of the Great Lakes region, with seemingly uncontrollable consequences. So how does this occur that a seemingly more valuable species of mussel can become even more valuable through its increasing scarcity, while another species becomes exponentially less valuable, to the point of being labelled aggressively invasive and a pest? Particularly when both species co-exist in both habitats?

This project addresses how the conservational privilege of certain species over others leads to negative impacts on ecologies through the act of forced culturing of a pearl from the Margaritifera margaritifera (freshwater pearl mussel) onto the invasive Dreissena polymorpha (zebra mussel). This will be realised as a data driven transmedia installation centred around the fetishized artefact of the cultured pearl on a non-pearl producing species, along with a peripheral narratology using postnatural and digital fabrication methods to be presented as a in order to underscore the themes being addressed and comprising of several outputs produced within the framework of dataism. This artistic approach was also developed in order to address and shift our historically anthropocentric views of migration, immigration, displacement of native populations through foreign colonisation. The introduction of new species into native ecosystems is generally perceived as an invasion whereas it is more of a case of colonisation. This project will examine these parallels, through the act of directly invading the body of one species with fragments from another, in order to assimilate its ‘valuable’ qualities, in this case producing a beautiful pearl. This very process questions a plethora of cultural paradigms that expand well beyond how we perceive the ecologies of invasive species, to include notions of time, space, gender, race, culture, scarcity, conservation privileging of beautiful organisms, transatlantic paradigms of migration, colonisation and invasion, the role of mothering (the ‘mothering of pearl for example) and more.