Mala Sangre

Berlin, 2026

Waiting for my plane on the way back to Berlin after my annual visit to my family in Guatemala, I was going through the most intense part of La Tiranía de las Moscas by Elaine Villar Madruga — one of the queer novels most unanimously loved by the librarians I asked during my trip. In it, one of the siblings falls in love with a bridge, finally unleashing the madness of the father’s tyrannical figure. The other two children possess magical powers: one attracts animals that want to kill themselves, and the youngest makes drawings outside of the rational world of grown-ups. 

The father’s words echoed over and over again in my mind: “You carry mala sangre,” or “bad blood,” meaning their blood was poisoned and that they were a failure in his lineage of order and imposition. Looking up the meaning of the phrase in Spanish, which later left a bad taste in my mouth because it can also mean to feel envious — to me one of the worst feelings a person can hold — I started playing with other combinations of words related to blood in a ludic time passing activity before boarding the airplane. I came across the one image that would unleash my new obsession.

The picture showed a row of alien-like creatures tied up, a syringe piercing their bodies and extracting their blood. It could have been a still taken straight out of a sci-fi film, but instead it documents the brutal extraction of a precious liquid that sustains the modern pharmaceutical complex and the way we produce vaccines.

This is a refracted, rhizomatic story that branches off in unexpected directions. I pay attention to this non-pattern-seeking approach in diametrical opposition to the way artificial intelligence reproduces information. It is an experimental artistic approach. 

The alien in the picture was Limulus polyphemus, also known as the horseshoe crab, an ancient marine arthropod that has existed for hundreds of millions of years, surviving five major mass extinctions and complicating the idea that evolution always means obvious, dramatic change. Instead, it has evolved genetically and diversified into different species while keeping its overall form.

I think about Vinciane Despret while I tell these stories, knowing I am framing certain things while leaving others outside. And that’s exactly my attempt. To entangle three unusual stories this creature inspires.

For me, it is also fascinating not only that their bodies can adapt to their environment, but also that their bodies are environments themselves, sustaining other life forms in their carapaces.

Their blood is blue because it uses a copper-based oxygen-carrying protein called hemocyanin instead of iron-based hemoglobin, as humans do. Their blood also clots very quickly around bacteria and toxins, which protects them from infection. That same clotting reaction is why humans use horseshoe crab blood to test medicines and medical devices for contamination.

This same value is part of what endangers them. Horseshoe crabs face pressure from over-harvesting, habitat loss, and degradation of the beaches and coastal areas they need to breed, while climate change and fishing bycatch add further strain. In some regions, populations have declined sharply, and researchers warn that continued exploitation for biomedical use, combined with fragmented habitat can push local populations toward extinction.

As I scrolled down in disbelief at what I was seeing, I came across several articles from the period when scientists were racing to develop a COVID-19 vaccine, which renewed experiments on them.

In 2000, after nearly two decades of research, Jeak Ling and her team, including her husband, succeeded in genetically engineering the key bacterial-detection enzyme called Factor C. This cloned version of recombinant Factor C (rFC) is more stable and chemically consistent than the natural form, thus “ensuring an unlimited supply of animal-free and standardized endotoxin tests for the biochemical industry.” However, it has not replaced the traditional method because of regulatory caution, industry inertia, and concerns about consistency and implementation.

Blue blood being extracted from horseshoe crabs before they are returned to the shoreline. Photograph: Ariane Mueller

Biomimicry

In an exercise in the experimental film class at the University of the Arts Berlin, my professor helped me in the early stages of my research, asking everyone to say the first three things that came to their minds in associations with the animal. I took note of the words.

alien

Giger

vacuum cleaner

dangerous 

tank

WWII SS helmet

shield

armour.

What first fascinated me about these creatures was indeed their alien form. Considering how long they have been on Earth compared to humans, they puts in perspective the idea of who the outsider actually is.  After hearing these associations I was left wondering where those resemblances even start.

I often think of this renewed interest in the work of contemporary artists in Berlin, after Gigers works. Many times I’ve encountered a sort of hybrid between the alien/organic forms and the artificial/mechanical in relation to the body. It often engages with topics of technology as a threat as well as a device for protection.

Security and defence are the driving forces of the weapons industry, which promises protection for a vulnerable nation. An example is the promotional video on the arms industry Rheinmetall’s website, where militarized aesthetics are deployed merging war with the imaginative tools of art — creativity, intuition, and innovation — framing combat as a creative art form. It refers to the pervasive process by which military institutions co-opt artistic concepts.

Seeing this, I asked myself further: if militarised aesthetics describes war absorbing the language, posture, and methods of art, then how does art absorb the logics of militarisation? How do these logics, the fetishisation of violent objects, and the normalisation of warfare as an artistic expression translate into visual culture? 

Dog robots appear both in art exhibitions as well as in combat. The study of exoskeletons is carried out both by performers and by scientists designing soldiers’ armatures. If many of our sciences have been sustained by the pillars of the Western male mad scientist, obsessed with Darwinian notions of evolution in which domination and competition prevail, then these ideas later seep through the aesthetics we come to desire.

Biomimicry precedes many of our technological inventions: the airplane followed a series of studies of bird flight. It refers to the practice of learning from nature’s forms, processes, and systems to solve human problems, especially in design, engineering, and architecture. In this sense, it means copying or adapting strategies developed by plants, animals, and ecosystems.

Horseshoe crabs protect themselves with a hard exoskeleton, burial in sand, camouflage, and nocturnal activity, not with biting or stinging. That makes them a strong symbol of defence as boundary-setting rather than violence. 

Protection is not just a barrier against harm; it is a way of preserving the conditions that allow life, relation, and transformation to continue. In that sense, protection is never purely defensive. It is also generative: it creates a space in which something vulnerable can endure, adapt, and remain itself.

Horseshoe crabs survive by becoming difficult to grasp, difficult to notice, and difficult to interrupt. Their survival depends on managing proximity, on choosing when to appear and when to withdraw. The telson, so often read as a threatening tail or primitive weapon, is in fact less a tool of attack than of orientation and recovery: it helps the animal right itself when overturned and move through its environment.

The horseshoe crab therefore suggests another model: one that is not built on preemption, domination, it becomes an unexpectedly radical image of protection.

Entangled Migrations

Horseshoe crabs typically spawn in relation to the full moon and also the new moon, usually during high tides at night, what sounds definitely like a healthy ritual humans could get inspired by.

After laying thousands of eggs, shorebirds such as red knots stop along Delaware Bay to eat horseshoe crab eggs during their migration from southern South America to the Arctic. Unlike humans, birds can move without restriction across landscapes following their drives to migrate.

The extinction of the Horseshoe crabs poses a threat to the birds, that rely on the eggs for their journey. It leaves me anxiously wondering about the unknown ways other systems could be disrupted and the myriad ways everything is interconnected and relies on something else.

Like the birds, I make a stop in this story, for talking about the United Stated means being responsible to talk about it’s current migration policies . Delaware has been no exception in the brutal enforcement of legal and physical force against migrants.  The people sustaining their economy, some fleeing war torn countries (wars the United States caused) are now the enemy of the state. With urgency I think of the siblings that started this story for they too, where fighting a tiran and the only way they could defeat him was fighting with their magic together.

I insert this story back here:

The United Fruit Company (UFCO), now known as Chiquita Brands International, played a pivotal role in South American politics during the 20th century. In 1954, the U.S. orchestrated a coup d'état in Guatemala to protect UFCO's extensive land holdings and economic interests. Guatemalans had been pushing for land reform in response to the widespread dispossession caused by UFCO, which controlled vast amounts of farmland. The democratically elected government of Jacobo Árbenz sought to redistribute unused UFCO land to peasants, triggering U.S. fears of communism. Following the coup, the U.S. installed a military dictator, who reversed land reforms and brutally repressed opposition, eventually unfolding in a civil war. The Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996) is considered one of the bloodiest civil wars in Latin America. It lasted 36 years, leading to the deaths and disappearances of an estimated 200,000 people, most of whom were Indigenous Maya civilians. The war was marked by state-sponsored violence, including massacres, forced disappearances, and genocide under military regimes.

One of the most important questions that I carry with me is why I decided to move to Germany.The Post-War Guatemalan civil society (although impossible to talk about a homogenous one in such a diverse country) is still torn apart by the daily violence, that in my understanding, was a sequel and consequences of the civil war. I migrated in the search of a safe nest that could hold my queerness and where I could feel safe.

With the horseshoe crabs I’ve come across different unusual entanglements. A queer animal itself that reframes temporalities, notions of evolution and protection as well as providing an example of codependency and migration systems. It matters to me in what way there stories are told and what particular parts of it we pay attention to. The initial image further unfolded in a series of questions fractured in different paths that keep moving and going in different directions, as if the other stories want to come find me. All I can offer is to channel them trough my experience.

Sources

Smithsonian Institution, “Limulus polyphemus,” accessed April 10th, 2026, https://invasions.si.edu/nemesis/species_summary/82703.

South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, “Atlantic Horseshoe Crab,” https://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/pub/seascience/pdf/horseshoecrab.pdf.

Animal Diversity Web, “Limulus polyphemus,” https://animaldiversity.org/accounts/Limulus_polyphemus/.

The Wetlands Institute, “Horseshoe Crab Conservation,” https://wetlandsinstitute.org/conservation/horseshoe-crab-conservation/.

Mark L. Botton, “The Ecological Importance of Horseshoe Crabs in Estuarine and Coastal Communities,” https://www.horseshoecrab.org/research/sites/default/files/DONE%20Botton.pdf.

Britannica, “Horseshoe Crab: A Key Player in Ecology, Medicine, and More,” https://www.britannica.com/story/horseshoe-crab-a-key-player-in-ecology-medicine-and-more.

Horseshoe Crab Association, “Biomedical Use of Horseshoe Crabs,” https://horseshoecrab.org/biomedical-use-of-horseshoe-crabs/.

U.S. Food and Drug Administration, “Characterization of Recombinant Factor C Enzyme Critical...,” https://www.fda.gov/science-research/fda-stem-outreach-education-and-engagement/characterization-recombinant-factor-c-enzyme-cri.

National Center for Biotechnology Information, “Are They Comparable for the Detection of Environmental Endotoxins?,” https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32817324/.

McGill University, “Civil War | Guatemala,” https://www.mcgill.ca/trauma-globalhealth/countries/guatemala/profile/civilwar.

Center for Justice and Accountability, “Guatemala,” https://cja.org/where-we-work/guatemala/ .