Apoptotic Bodies

Eduardo Padilha

2024

Embalming machine, stainless steel trays, acrylic boxes, dual membrane bioreactor culture flasks, supplemented DMEM culture medium, primary human fibroblast cell line, BJ-5ta immortalized human fibroblast cell line, A-375 human melanoma cell line; dimensions variable.

Presented as part of Emergence: Art from Life

In his work A Brief Dictionary of Poetic Biological Phenomena, Eduardo Padilha writes that all living matter engages in the work of poetry. “‘Poetic’ deriv[es] from the Greek poiein,” he writes, “meaning ‘creation’ or ‘production.’” Sometimes this creation entails dying. A writer, researcher, artist, Global Community Bio Summit organizer, and Structural Genomics Consortium collaborator, Padilha’s work invokes a poetics of cellular death, exploring how living and dying are mutually constitutive even within the same organism.

In Apoptotic Bodies, Padilha elaborates on the metabolic process of apoptosis, or programmed cell death. When a cell “wants” to die, it engages in a series of precise metabolic pathway activations. Enzymes then destroy proteins within the cell, triggering a sequence of transformations that culminate in the cell’s death and disintegration. Apoptotic bodies are the remnants of this process. These fragments of dead cells send out an “eat me” signal to nearby phagocytes, alerting the body that they need to be absorbed. The flourishing of a multicellular organism depends on allowing certain cells to shed, or fall (ptosis) away (apo). 

Apoptotic Bodies contains three cell lines. The first is derived from a fibroblast, a type of cell that creates and maintains connective tissue that binds the body together. The second is an “immortalized” human fibroblast cell line often used in studies of stress, aging, and disease. A cell line is immortalized by the targeted introduction of cancer-inducing viruses or mutations and can grow indefinitely in vitro. The final cell line is A-375, a human melanoma cell line. The proliferation of all these cells would have made them the target of apoptosis–successful or otherwise–within the matrix of a human body. Instead, they exist in Apoptotic Bodies in a state of suspension: progenitive yet sterile, abundant yet alone.

–Natasha K. Boyd

Image Credit: Carson Davis Brown

Apoptotic Bodies was featured in Emergence: Art from Life, an exhibition at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center, as part of PST ART. Presented by Getty, PST ART returned in September 2024 with Art & Science Collide, a regional event exploring the connections between art and science, past and present.

Thank you PST ART; JACCC; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; and The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles for your support of Emergence.