Eat your heart out, James Franco. While you were filming naked
Marion Laval-Jeantet [pictured, in 2007] prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by getting injected with different horse immunoglobulins over the course of several months.
These foreign animal antibodies were injected in progressively larger amounts to allow her to build up tolerance in a process that she referred to as “mithridatisation,” after the Persian king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who supposedly built up an immunity to poison by regularly consuming small doses of it.
Earlier this year, after months of preparation, she was injected with horse blood plasma, which contained the full spectrum of immunoglobulins without provoking an allergic reaction.
As part of the performance piece she also wore a set of stilts with hooves on the end to feel at one with the horse. She walked around with the donor horse in a “communication ritual” before having her hybrid blood extracted and freeze-dried.
She explained to Centre Press that the whole process made her feel “hyperpowerful, hypersensitive and hypernervous.” She added: “I had a feeling of being superhuman. I was not normal in my body. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like a horse.” [Wired]
I consider this an important piece.
She injected herself with the blood of a horse and it made her feel “a little bit like a horse?” Why, I hardly know where the science ends and the art begins! Eat your heart out, James Franco. Suddenly it seems… the dicknose is on the other hoof.
(Slightly NSFW, but totally tasteful)