Bulletproof Skin: 2.6g 329m/s

Text published in June 2011 at www.badaward.nl

Jalila Essaïdi and Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands developed the project 2.6g 329m/s which includes creation of bulletproof transgenic human skin. The project emphatically explores the social, political, ethical and cultural issues concerning safety.

“I want to show that the safety in its broadest sense is a relative concept, and hence the term bulletproof. If the skin is pierced by the bullet, the experiment is certainly successful.”

Interview with Jalila Essaïdi and Marcel Piët (Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands)

2.6 g 329 m/s Bulletproof skin – a proof of the relativity of safety

Artist Jalila Essaidi, fascinated by nature and its potentials contrived an idea of producing a bulletproof human skin to explore the social, political, ethical and cultural issues concerning safety. The process of making this kind of skin is, as we can imagine, extremely complicated.

Firstly, the artist had to acquire a lot of extraordinary, unobtainable materials, of which one was spider’s silk produced by transgenic silkworm. The word transgenic (refers to any organism which contains genetic material artificially transferred from another species) is important here because specific sequences of spider silk DNA are inserted into the genetic make-up of a silkworm, so an insect starts to produce a spider protein – the thread which is almost as strong and flexible as the thread of the native spider (strength relative to native spider silk is 80 %).

Next avant-garde material that the artist needed was living human skin cells, in order to blend them, of course, with transgenic spider’s silk, so after five weeks the bulletproof skin would be produced. After the production of the skin, the artist needed ballistic gel (used to simulate the density and viscosity of human muscle tissue) which is used at the shooting ranges, and last but not least – the glorious bullet, how she could finally confront the skin, test the strength of this unusual artwork, obtained from completely new invented material. Hence, the subject matter is not the only new one in this bio-art work, but also a material the work is made of. In order to find out more about this work of art and its resistance to bullets we are going to put a few questions to Jalila Essaidi and scientist Marcel Piët (the manager of the Forensic Genomics Consortium Netherlands), who she cooperated with.

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