1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:06,000 So, first of all, thank you so much. Would you be able to say your name and what you do? 2 00:00:06,000 --> 00:00:18,000 Yeah, my name is Lauri, my pronouns are they them, and probably in this sense I am a creative and a bug enthusiast. 3 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:28,000 Lauri Pavlovich is the artist behind the work Bugs Against the Binary, which was shown at Melbourne's Science Gallery. 4 00:00:28,000 --> 00:00:37,000 This artwork was all about challenging conventional notions of sex, sexuality and gender using really cool bugs. 5 00:00:44,000 --> 00:00:52,000 Hi, my name is Zophia. I use she her pronouns, and Lauri happens to be a friend of mine from our days at Melbourne's queer youth events. 6 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:58,000 I remember the magical experience of seeing bugs against the binary for the very first time. 7 00:00:58,000 --> 00:01:10,000 You walk in and find yourself surrounded by a circle of six tanks, home to insects whose very biological existence breaks human societal conventions. 8 00:01:10,000 --> 00:01:14,000 Snails who have both male and female sex organs. 9 00:01:14,000 --> 00:01:19,000 Detachable penis spiders, yes, that is their real name. 10 00:01:19,000 --> 00:01:30,000 Ultraviolet glowing scorpions whose enclosures resemble underground queer ballroom runways, complete with disco ball and tens across the board. 11 00:01:30,000 --> 00:01:32,000 And that's just the beginning. 12 00:01:32,000 --> 00:01:38,000 I tracked down Lauri to ask about the inspiration behind the work and also ask, why bugs? 13 00:01:38,000 --> 00:01:48,000 So I am autistic and bugs have been a lifelong special interest for me, which my mother was very thrilled about when I would bring them home as a child. 14 00:01:48,000 --> 00:02:00,000 So I kind of, when I was looking at the theme of break the binaries, I was thinking about my own gender being non-binary, but then I was also thinking about how that kind of links in to a lot of my other interests. 15 00:02:00,000 --> 00:02:22,000 So I really wanted to create an exhibit that showcased all the different ways that so many different bugs do break the binaries and don't fit into the kind of gender roles and systems and kind of boxes we have within society. 16 00:02:22,000 --> 00:02:38,000 A big comparison between gender and bugs that I used a lot throughout the exhibition when I was speaking to people about it was often people's immediate reaction to a spider or a bug when they see it is just to squish it because they freak out and they're like, oh, absolutely not, and they just squish it. 17 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:46,000 And a lot of the time that's just because they don't really understand kind of the benefits of bugs and how much they really, really do for our world. 18 00:02:46,000 --> 00:02:52,000 I find as people start to understand bugs a lot more, they get a lot more comfortable with coexisting with them. 19 00:02:52,000 --> 00:03:10,000 And I think it's really similar for trans identities. People who don't understand what it means to be trans and what goes into our identities often react with very immediate transphobia and very immediate like, no, absolutely not, that's not right, this doesn't fit in with what I've been told. 20 00:03:10,000 --> 00:03:20,000 And it's kind of like squishing the spider. But then I have never met somebody who throughout being open to learning about transness has not changed their mind. 21 00:03:20,000 --> 00:03:28,000 They always tend to grow and begin to understand more about empathy. 22 00:03:28,000 --> 00:03:40,000 And yeah, I've got a lot of friends who and family members as well who weren't totally chill with the whole trans thing when I came out, but have grown a lot since then and are now massive allies. 23 00:03:40,000 --> 00:03:46,000 So I think those two parallels between bugs and people is pretty huge. 24 00:03:46,000 --> 00:03:57,000 And I found throughout the exhibition, a lot of people went in with maybe some kind of prior feelings about bugs and trans people and came out with their minds changed, which was really cool. 25 00:03:57,000 --> 00:04:05,000 I loved Lauri's Living Artwork, but it wasn't enough just to see it. 26 00:04:05,000 --> 00:04:10,000 I had to go deeper to really get into the guts of it. 27 00:04:10,000 --> 00:04:14,000 The insect guts and where there's insect guts, there's... 28 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:20,000 Yeah, that's a big thing of poo. Like see, this is like the entire thing. 29 00:04:20,000 --> 00:04:27,000 Yeah, I'll give you a shot of the next one to pull some guts out and stuff. 30 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:29,000 Let me back up for a second. 31 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:35,000 A few days before that clip you just heard, I received a very special package from Lauri. 32 00:04:35,000 --> 00:04:41,000 You see, some stick insects had naturally passed away during the course of the exhibition. 33 00:04:41,000 --> 00:04:54,000 And like the diehard stands who spend megabucks on locks of their idols hair, I was now holding in my hands to cryogenically preserved celebrity stick insects that had been on display in the artwork. 34 00:04:54,000 --> 00:05:02,000 At least the version of cryogenic preservation that involved a takeaway container and Lauri's fridge freezer. 35 00:05:02,000 --> 00:05:08,000 I am sure frozen head King Walt Disney would not have approved of this technique. 36 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:17,000 These Diva Phasmids had been seen by hundreds, maybe thousands, but probably not millions of Melbourneians and now they were in my hands. 37 00:05:17,000 --> 00:05:22,000 And I was going to do the only thing with them that they deserved after such an epic life. 38 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:26,000 Make them into gay bug art for my girlfriend. 39 00:05:26,000 --> 00:05:37,000 I think, I think it's mostly a poo that's a problem, so I won't pull from the upper abdomen, but I should pull from the lower abdomen. 40 00:05:37,000 --> 00:05:43,000 That was Clarice. Clarice, who are you and why are you pulling out bug proofing guts? 41 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:55,000 Hi Zafia. Well, my name is Clarice Sawyer. I use she her pronouns and I'm an insect taxidermist, which means I preserve insects after death. 42 00:05:55,000 --> 00:06:02,000 And to do that, you have to take out things that would normally get a bit stinky after a while inside their exoskeleton. 43 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:14,000 So Clarice and I have been friends since high school and now we're sitting together cross legged on the living room floor of her Fips Row share house, pulling out bug guts with tweezers on the coffee table. 44 00:06:14,000 --> 00:06:20,000 Clarice has just signed off on the abdomens being free from poo, guts and unfertilized eggs. 45 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:26,000 And we've now moved on to arranging the legs with pins in the positions that they'll dry in. 46 00:06:26,000 --> 00:06:34,000 I also have to mention that she's wearing a beautiful multicolored 70s gown as she explains all this. 47 00:06:34,000 --> 00:06:40,000 So what happens once you pin the legs where you want them? What happens then? 48 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:42,000 You just dry them. And then they stay? 49 00:06:42,000 --> 00:06:51,000 Yeah, yeah. So the thing is, right, the exoskeleton is made out of chitin, so there's not really much you have to do in terms of preserving it. 50 00:06:51,000 --> 00:07:12,000 There's no chemicals you need to add. I mean, the only thing is that if you're storing them, especially a lot of them, you should store them with mothballs because that stops museum beetles from getting into the displays. 51 00:07:12,000 --> 00:07:18,000 Yeah, that would be the only thing I say. But it's one of the easiest forms of taxidermy to be honest. 52 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:27,000 You know, it's kind of like a bit of a cop out. You know, people often like people often ask, you know, like, oh, is this really considered taxidermy? 53 00:07:27,000 --> 00:07:37,000 And I'm like, well, I mean, you're preserving dead things, but it's not like it's not the whole process that, you know, taxidermy is for some other animals. 54 00:07:37,000 --> 00:07:42,000 At Insect Emporium, the main preserved bugs that people like to buy are butterflies. 55 00:07:42,000 --> 00:07:49,000 Clarisse brings some out now. Two large tupperware containers filled with layers on layers of them. 56 00:07:49,000 --> 00:07:58,000 They look so beautiful laid out like that. There's a whole bunch of varieties all together. 57 00:07:58,000 --> 00:08:08,000 The butterflies wings are closed, so their bright colors are hidden and you can only see their brownish undersides, which are called the ventral side and are used for camouflage. 58 00:08:08,000 --> 00:08:13,000 Oh, so this is a Ulysses here. 59 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:20,000 Took me like opening the wings to find that out. So you see when I squeeze on this thorax, it causes the wings to open up. 60 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:26,000 And that's because like the hydraulic system that the butterflies use to open their wings is still present in death. 61 00:08:26,000 --> 00:08:36,000 So it's kind of like it's like the equivalent of, you know, when people pour like soy sauce on a squid or something that's recently died. 62 00:08:36,000 --> 00:08:41,000 And then the tentacles like move. But not really, because that's a nervous system. 63 00:08:41,000 --> 00:08:50,000 And this is hydraulics. It's kind of freaky how you can manipulate the body in the same way in which it moves in real life. 64 00:08:50,000 --> 00:08:56,000 And yes, sometimes like in the hot water, the proboscis actually kind of unrolls a bit. 65 00:08:56,000 --> 00:09:04,000 So if you want, you can actually unroll the proboscis so it's like long and pointy, which I've done before for 66 00:09:04,000 --> 00:09:10,000 Darwin or Wallace's Hawkmoth. I can't remember what it's called. 67 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:15,000 I think it's called Wallace's Hawkmoth, which has the longest proboscis in the world. 68 00:09:15,000 --> 00:09:26,000 And that's like an example of, it's an example of like, I think it's like it's like co-evolution, co-evolution. 69 00:09:26,000 --> 00:09:29,000 I should know that. Yeah. 70 00:09:29,000 --> 00:09:35,000 Clarice is talking here about something called diffuse or gilled co-evolution. 71 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:42,000 When a bunch of species of flowering plants evolve to start offering up their nectar at the end of a long tube, 72 00:09:42,000 --> 00:09:49,000 a bunch of species of insects will co-evolve to have a really long, thin mouth to get to that nectar. 73 00:09:49,000 --> 00:09:57,000 Charles Darwin was once presented with an extraordinarily long nectar tube on an orchid from Madagascar, 74 00:09:57,000 --> 00:10:04,000 a full 30 centimetres long. Upon receiving it, he exclaimed in a letter to a friend, 75 00:10:04,000 --> 00:10:08,000 Good heavens, what insect can suck it? 76 00:10:08,000 --> 00:10:12,000 The insect that could suck it wouldn't be found until after Darwin's death. 77 00:10:12,000 --> 00:10:19,000 A Madagascan hawkmoth with a tongue so long it could reach to the very bottom of the nectar tube. 78 00:10:19,000 --> 00:10:31,000 The thing is as well, in death, the wings aren't fully inflated, so I'm not sure if you've ever seen a butterfly come out of a cocoon, 79 00:10:31,000 --> 00:10:35,000 but when they come out of the cocoon, they've got to pump up their wings. 80 00:10:35,000 --> 00:10:46,000 So likewise, it's not going to be exactly the same, you know, even though we've done our best to do stuff like rehydrate them and etc. 81 00:10:46,000 --> 00:10:54,000 So when you say they pump up their wings, this is like with their hydraulic fluid system, they're putting fluid throughout the wings? 82 00:10:54,000 --> 00:10:56,000 Yeah, I think so. I think so, I think that's how it works. 83 00:10:56,000 --> 00:10:57,000 That is so cool. 84 00:10:57,000 --> 00:11:01,000 I do need to learn more. 85 00:11:01,000 --> 00:11:11,000 When a butterfly first emerges from its chrysalis, its wings are small, wet and deflated. They're no good at all for flying. 86 00:11:11,000 --> 00:11:23,000 In order to expand its wings, the butterfly has to pump a fluid called meconium into them so that they can expand, after which they dry and harden. 87 00:11:23,000 --> 00:11:32,000 It turns out that meconium is the metabolic waste product from the pupal stage of an insect, and I'm no entomologist, 88 00:11:32,000 --> 00:11:43,000 but the fact that the first thing a butterfly does on the first day of its new life is to pump up its wings with its poo and then poo out the rest of its poo. 89 00:11:43,000 --> 00:11:49,000 That's beautiful. 90 00:11:49,000 --> 00:11:57,000 I think when I started pinning, I was kind of scared of like touching dead things for some reason, like I had a bit of a phobia with like, 91 00:11:57,000 --> 00:12:02,000 so I would have like a lot shake your hands and what you have right now. 92 00:12:02,000 --> 00:12:09,000 So you can see this is sometimes quite a haphazard process, you know? 93 00:12:09,000 --> 00:12:24,000 Yeah, it's nice. I think like I, yeah, like, well, they're so self-contained, like little dried beings, like they don't, I don't know, it's very, it's not messy, the process. 94 00:12:24,000 --> 00:12:25,000 No! 95 00:12:25,000 --> 00:12:28,000 It doesn't have to be kind of haphazard, like it doesn't have to be like super duper. 96 00:12:28,000 --> 00:12:39,000 It's not like dissecting like a mammal or something, you know, that would be a lot more, I mean gross for one thing. 97 00:12:39,000 --> 00:12:49,000 Yeah, I know. Imagine if humans were like had external skeletons, you know, imagine what that would sort of be like, because we become so different after death, 98 00:12:49,000 --> 00:12:56,000 but like imagine if you would still be able to sort of see someone as they were when they were alive or close to it when they were. 99 00:12:56,000 --> 00:13:08,000 I mean, yeah, that would be really interesting. Like, I wonder, you know, I mean, it's difficult to tell because insects obviously are less complex creatures than us, 100 00:13:08,000 --> 00:13:14,000 but I wonder if they experience any kind of uncanny valley and looking at dead insects. 101 00:13:14,000 --> 00:13:19,000 Yeah, because it like, they look quite similar, like you can't see, I suppose, from the outside, like... 102 00:13:19,000 --> 00:13:21,000 Many signs of decay. 103 00:13:21,000 --> 00:13:24,000 Yeah, although they are, like they communicate mainly in pheromones, right? 104 00:13:24,000 --> 00:13:31,000 Yeah, so I guess, yeah, I guess from that they, and also like a lack of movement, they'd be like, oh, okay. 105 00:13:31,000 --> 00:13:33,000 Oh, my body. 106 00:13:33,000 --> 00:13:34,000 Yeah. 107 00:13:34,000 --> 00:13:36,000 My dude. 108 00:13:36,000 --> 00:13:48,000 One of my favourite sci-fi books is The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers. 109 00:13:48,000 --> 00:14:00,000 In this book, an alien species described as lobster centaurs have hard outer shells and are as smart and sophisticated as humans, if not more so. 110 00:14:00,000 --> 00:14:08,000 The book imagines what cultural differences a species might have if they had bodies like this. 111 00:14:08,000 --> 00:14:12,000 One way is that facial expressions are less important. 112 00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:23,000 Another is that males carry their partner's eggs in keratin pouches in their shell until they hatch. Isn't that beautiful? 113 00:14:23,000 --> 00:14:34,000 But of course, one of the most famous imaginings of humans inside insectoid bodies is Franz Kafka's short story The Metamorphosis. 114 00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:48,000 The main character, Gregor Samsa, wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a giant insect, a monstrous vermin, which is often interpreted to be a cockroach. 115 00:14:48,000 --> 00:15:00,000 His transformation, his new appearance, garbled speech, and new habits of crawling around the walls and ceiling cause him and his family immense distress. 116 00:15:00,000 --> 00:15:04,000 And it's ultimately the cause of his demise. 117 00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:20,000 The fact that this particular creature was chosen to represent a state of utter alien revulsion, I think shows the place that insects, and particularly pests, occupy in our culture. 118 00:15:20,000 --> 00:15:35,000 These creatures, whose bodies are so different to ours, are at times disgusting and at others aspirational, and always a rich and beautiful part of a biodiverse ecosystem and world. 119 00:15:50,000 --> 00:16:00,000 The spiny stick insects have dried, and they've been framed, and it's time to ring up Lauri and see what they think. 120 00:16:00,000 --> 00:16:09,000 So I feel like first of all, I shall just show you the little artwork that we created with your bugs before I ask you to tell me about it a little bit. 121 00:16:09,000 --> 00:16:14,000 So I'll show you, it's right above my head, and then I'll send you some pictures of it. Here it is. 122 00:16:14,000 --> 00:16:23,000 You really did make it gay. That's the best thing ever. 123 00:16:23,000 --> 00:16:24,000 Thank you. 124 00:16:24,000 --> 00:16:30,000 I have positioned the bugs so they look like they're giving each other a big kiss. 125 00:16:30,000 --> 00:16:35,000 Would you be able to tell me a bit about the bugs in the frame? 126 00:16:35,000 --> 00:16:50,000 Yeah, so there's a spiny leaf stick insect. They are native to Australia, and the two specimens that you've got in there are both females. 127 00:16:50,000 --> 00:17:05,000 The reason that I chose to include them in the exhibition is that they do not conform at all to the idea of maternal care that we have within human society. 128 00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:15,000 So the way that they reproduce is they literally just drop their eggs to the forest floor and hope for the best, and they never see their babies ever. 129 00:17:15,000 --> 00:17:23,000 So often keepers will not even realise that they've laid eggs because it's just laid on the floor. 130 00:17:23,000 --> 00:17:31,000 They can also reproduce via hearth and oogenesis, so they don't actually need a man at all, which is pretty cool. 131 00:17:31,000 --> 00:17:36,000 And yeah, when they drop their eggs to the bottom, often ants will pick them up thinking they're seeds, 132 00:17:36,000 --> 00:17:46,000 and then the ant storerooms are kind of the perfect place for stick insects to hatch because they take a really long time to hatch and they provide the perfect conditions. 133 00:17:46,000 --> 00:17:56,000 So not only do the mums just completely drop them to the floor and forget about them, but they make an entirely different species of insect raise their kids for them. 134 00:17:56,000 --> 00:18:05,000 So besides the tarantulas that we had, the semi-social pygmy tarantulas, she is a very hands-on mum, will stay with her babies for a very, very long time, feed them, etc. 135 00:18:05,000 --> 00:18:14,000 It just kind of shows a huge difference in the different maternal practices of the bug world. 136 00:18:14,000 --> 00:18:29,000 They do have kind of short lifespans, so we did have a couple of deaths, but the amazing thing about that was it meant I got to dissect them and pin them and keep their beauty going even after death. 137 00:18:29,000 --> 00:18:40,000 Yeah, could you tell me a little bit about that? What made you decide to pin them and dissect them and, like you say, keep their beauty going? 138 00:18:40,000 --> 00:18:50,000 Yeah, so I think bugs can freak people out a lot, and I'm always keen for them to be appreciated, 139 00:18:50,000 --> 00:18:56,000 and different people have varying capacities to appreciate them in different forms. 140 00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:01,000 Like some people really just cannot deal with live bugs, other people really can't deal with dead ones. 141 00:19:01,000 --> 00:19:11,000 So I just kind of wanted to add a bit of variety into the ways that they could be viewed and appreciated to hopefully spark a bit of a passion in some people. 142 00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:20,000 And yeah, the dissection just came with the preservation process because you've got to remove their insides to make sure that they are well preserved. 143 00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:26,000 And it was actually a really fascinating process and not something that I was expecting to get out of that exhibition. 144 00:19:26,000 --> 00:19:28,000 So that was really awesome. 145 00:19:28,000 --> 00:19:35,000 Honestly, I just hope that this podcast and project inspires more people to get more involved with bugs. 146 00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:45,000 They're incredible in a lot of different ways, and I'm sure that your listeners will discover that more and more as the weeks go on. 147 00:19:45,000 --> 00:19:54,000 Next week on the show, we're talking to another artist whose work collides with insects, but in a whole different way. 148 00:19:54,000 --> 00:20:22,000 Thank you for joining us. See you then. 149 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:51,000 Thank you. 150 00:20:54,000 --> 00:20:57,000 Thank you.