Gabi Dao

Gabi Dao

Sweet Blood in Stagnant Waters, 2025

Two-channel video installation, color, sound (20 min) with marionettes and two marionette stages

Overall dimensions variable

Co-produced by The Vega Foundation and TBA21-Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary within the framework of the 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, 2025. Financially supported by the Mondriaan Fund. With additional production support from Publiek Park

Sweet Blood in Stagnant Waters is a genre-blending film installation that merges experimental cinema, fantasy, and science fiction with puppetry to reflect on the entangled crises of disease, ecology, and state control. Using marionettes and two puppet stages, the artists center the mosquito—one of the planet’s deadliest creatures—as a symbol through which to explore the intimate and geopolitical effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing global burden of malaria.

Set in a near-future dystopia, the narrative follows a government-backed documentary crew producing propaganda to encourage emigration from a declining Earth to a colonized planet, Proxy Planet D. A family of cyborgs—Axa, her pregnant trans daughter Mary, Mary’s partner Zero, and their unborn child Baby—becomes the state’s model for successful planetary resettlement. But beneath the planet’s sanitized facade lies a web of surveillance technologies that quietly oppress its inhabitants through neurological interference.

When Mary is bitten by a genetically altered mosquito and contracts a new strain of malaria, her pregnancy takes a fantastical turn: Baby begins to develop as a mosquito-human hybrid and speaks to her through hallucinations. As Earth's federal agents target Mary’s pregnancy for bioweapons research, she flees into subterranean caves, guided by Baby’s dream-visions of resistance and survival.

Blending queer ecology, surveillance culture, colonial medicine, and speculative storytelling, Sweet Blood in Stagnant Waters examines human vulnerability and resilience amid the diseased landscapes of a collapsing world. Through its layered narrative and handcrafted aesthetics, the work invites reflection on how bodies, technologies, and ecosystems are entangled in the violence—and imagination—of planetary futures.

CURRENTLY ON VIEW:

Group show: The 36th Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts, “ORACLE”

Curator: Chus Martínez

Venue: MGLC (Grad Tivoli, Švicarija, Plečnik Auditorium), Museum of Modern Art (MG+), City Art Gallery Ljubljana, Jakopič Promenade - for detailed information, please visit the website of the biennale

Date: June 6, 2025 - October 12, 2025