The Transspecies Palace provides the mechanical and hydrothermal conditions to multiply the diversity and density of a microbial community of aerobic and anaerobic live, including cyanobacteria, phyla proteobacteria, firmicutes, photoautotrophic bacteria, chemoautotrophic bacteria, azotobacter, beijerinckia, clostridium and rhizobium. Together this microbial community has the capacity to metabolize the toxicity of damaged environments and contribute to their ecological reparation. Its thick cork crust, developed by a multidisciplinary team led by OFFPOLINN and first tested in the facade of Reggio School in Madrid. It captures and retains mineral, sucrase and lipid particles in the irregularity of the cork mass. The types of cork selected provide a spectrum of cavities within the porous cork structure that facilitates and accelerates the growth of fungi hyphae, that are later used as a system of fungi highways, that allows bacteria to settle inside the cork. In conditions of sustained humidity, and anchored to the interior of hypha walls a diversity of bacteria collaborate to build an exopolysaccharide matrix. These are sophisticated informational and material systems that provide the genetic and physical armature where processes of carbon sequestration and oxygen production can be intensified by the
planting of DNA fragments of selected microbes. For OFFPOLINN, the Transspecies Palace affirms how human life and social relationships expand beyond bodies, in an alliance with morethan-human life. Life and societal interaction are distributed and transscalar enactments, where the microbial, the bodily and the planetary coproduce each other. It also marks a transition from an architecture of carbonization, non-human sacrificability and extractivism; to one of mutual care.

The Transspecies Palace is a new commission developed for the exhibition ‘We The Bacteria. Notes Toward Biotic Architecture’, curated by Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley for the 24a Esposizione Internazionale della Triennale di Milano.