Mael Le Mée, french plastic artist and screenwriter, has been developing the Benway Institute as a fictional company since 2004. This project has been hosted in the fields of contemporary art, science fiction, research in human sciences and scientific popularization in France, Switzerland, and Spain. It takes the shape of conferences (where Mael plays the role of the Institute’s Head of Public Relations for a presentation of the history, products and services of his company through archive documents), promotional exhibitions, organ sales and “Do-It-Yourself” Comfort Organs workshops.

The Institute’s conference is an invigorating digest of the “Benway of Life”.

It is participative and interacts with its spectators’ bodies through various attractions:

- a humanitarian saliva collection to fight malnutrition in Southern countries

- an authentic 50’s psychological test: “Do you have a scientific mind?”

- a live endoscopy of the first Comfort Animal created by the Institute

- an organic synchronization of two spectators

- a hormone patch to be won

- the tasting of the speaker’s meat after a live extraction, as a final eucharist.

The Benway Institute challenges on an ironic tone the rhetoric of progress, marketability of biotechnologies and anthropotechnics as well as the growing intertwining of sciences, states, and bodies of citizens. It is a proposal for a popular and fantastical history of science, drawing a parallel between current utopias and the dreams of the 1950s, when DNA was “invented”,  and the consumer society became the dominant model. It is a research written as an hybrid process: visual, sonorous, performative, and literary. A poetic experiment nourished by biomedicine jargon and icons, inhabiting the edge of what provokes and fosters the communication between the inside and the outside of bodies: the scalpel and  imagination.

A critical point of view is choosen but it don’t reject body modification in itself. Other people stand up in the Benway Institute’s world, between fiction and reality: biohackers, militants for a free organogenesis or open source wetware, promoters of a user-generated body, surgeons and genetic handymen in their garage labs, opponents to the patenting of the living (natural or industrialized), people longing for unbridled body augmentation or reduction (groups promoting voluntary amputation), individuals or communities looking for an alternative to the dominant biopower.

This work is about inviting the public to experiment with a controversial reality to come: other incarnations.

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Comfort Organs

Below : an authentic 1959 french comic book by Benway Publishing...