A New Friend; Cockroach!
Cockroach had existed almost since before human evolved; they almost unchanged for perhaps two hundred and fifty million years. They breathe the same air that we breathe in; you can find them almost everywhere in this world, though they avoid sunlight as much as they can–they might be just hiding under your dresser, your damp bathroom, the small storage beneath the plumbing, or sometimes in between your laundry piles.
There is an incredible variety of cockroaches: more than 30 cockroach species out of 4,600 are associated with human habitats and about four species of these ancient friends are well known as vermin.

AS FOOD
This ancient friend is considered disgusting in the western part of the globe. Cockroaches are eaten in many places around the world. Whereas household pest cockroaches may carry bacteria and viruses, cockroaches bred under laboratory conditions can be used to prepare nutritious food. In Mexico and Thailand, the heads and legs are removed, and the remainder may be boiled, sautéed, grilled, dried, or diced. In China, cockroaches have become popular as medicine and cockroach farming is rising with over 100 farms. The cockroaches are fried twice in a wok of hot oil, which makes them crispy with soft innards that are like cottage cheese. Fried cockroaches are ground and sold as pills for stomach, heart and liver diseases. A cockroach recipe from Formosa (Taiwan) specifies salting and frying cockroaches after removing the head and entrails.

FOR THE FUTURE
Today, we know that the requirement to minimize waste and resource use is equally necessary on Earth. The future is always symbolised by reproduction; children are the future. The future is not only for humans and their offsprings, but also for agencies or other creatures besides humans. Therefore, when thinking about the future, we also have to think about sustainability.

Sustainability can be achieved if life is not only human-centered. Humans only exploit what is in nature for their own needs. Humans are not the only creature that has an agency.

Some Stories regarding Cockroach

BREATHING
Cockroaches do not have lungs as do vertebrates and can continue to respire if their heads are removed. How can we humans possible to respire in such a damp place? Lung-related diseases are the common troubles of human health. Moreover, human is considered not human if their heads disjointed. It is an undead. However, that is not the case with the cockroach. Cockroach is defined as cockroach even if their head is missing. There is no undead for being a cockroach.

DIET
Cockroaches aren’t picky eaters. There are certain types of foods they prefer above others, such as sweets, like candies and cookies, starches like potatoes, bread and grains, and animal proteins. They can also live for quite a while without food. However, if the food supplies dwindle, they will always move or eventually eat their babies or eat each other in order to survive.

In the animal kingdom, they are infamous for being a scavenger; they can eat both plants-based food and animals. Not to mention, cockroach loves to eat books, human nails, eyebrows, or paint crackles. They simply have an insatiable appetite.

It is possible for us, human beings, to eat less in the future unlike cockroach that can eat anything. However, we humans are different; what we consume will affect our body and mind. Lack of oxygen and the calorie-restricted, nutrient-dense diet contributes a significant change in the psychology. We may have learned to have a raw food diet, but we cannot simply live as it is as we have to wait for our food to grow and we have a moral belief towards cannibalism. However, we need to think in term of sustainability: will it be possible for human to consume waste? Can we evolve into an entity that could consume its own waste, and not only waste in the term of excrement, but a synthetic waste that is hardly recycled? Cockroach eats plastic. Why instead of overcoming the problem of plastic waste by employing bacteria that could consume synthetic material, we never expose our limit and capabilities to digesting plastic? Why the needs of looking other being for our own destruction? Let’s implement cockroaches’ way of digesting. Why do we always look for a short term solution for a long-term problem we have created?

PHYSICAL CAPABILITY
This tenacious creature can survive a lot of abuse and try and avoid light at all cost. They spent most of their time eating, moving and breeding in the dark. They can swim naturally and can hold their breath for 40 minutes straight. They can climb walls and some materials to build homes and commercial buildings like concrete, drywall, tile, and stone, all give them plenty of footholds to skitter up walls. Can we instead of filling more space by making house invent a more powerful capability that let us living without protection? Evolving into a supranatural being like the cockroach.

According to research by Hokkaido University in Japan, cockroaches can produce eggs by parthenogenesis, a type of asexual reproduction. Some types of female cockroaches can develop their maternal egg alone to produce offspring themselves.

Like other arthropods that reproduce in this way, they only do so when males are unavailable as they have a lower rate of survival than ones created by normal reproduction.

EMOTION
Insects don’t have nociceptor1 to detect uncomfortable stimulus. They can’t feel pain when a human can feel pain without needing to be hurt physically. They don’t have a complex brain to function either. Also. some species of cockroaches are capable to reproduce without the need for males whilst we still question life and gender.

Footnote:

  1. Nociceptor is a sensory neuron that responds to damaging or potentially damaging stimuli by sending “possible threat” signals to the spinal cord and the brain.

Towards the Possibilities of Crossbreeding
ANCIENT DREAM OF CROSSBREEDING

Human has ever speculated about the possibility of crossbreeding human beings and nonhuman animals. The ancient myth constantly refers to the result of interbreeding. Carnivals and sideshows today present apparent part human-part animal “specimens.” A noted physicians analyses the possibility of this biological phenomenon from a scientific point of view penetrating article.

There are absolutely difficulties of cross-breeding human beings and animals with a number of factors preventing interspecies crossing. Sometimes there are physiological differences in the constitution of the egg and the sperm which make it impossible for the sperm to enter the egg.

The common myth and fairytale that popped out in my head about crossbreeding familiar through the images of Sphinx1, Mermaid/Merman2, Centaur3, Echidna4, Baphomet5, Siren6, and Medusa7.

Science doesn’t know everything. Scientist only surmises and has an opinion with little evidence supporting whatever they are working on. Did Jessica Rabbit give birth to a rabbit boy?

Death and decay sometimes make you want to resurrect your childhood.

I have never seen any fairy tales about the love between cockroach and human? Can someone give me a reference to this idea? Let’s consider man’s nearest relatives, the apes. Remember the film ‘The Planet of the Apes’? Gorilla, the largest of the man-like apes, once had a worse reputation for ferocity than he has today.

Because of some reasons, so far humans and animals cannot interbreed. So much possible in science that it would be unreasonable to assert that the day will never come when humans and animals may interbreed.

However, is it possible to gain something from the most powerful animals to improve our lives? Other than consuming it on a daily basis.

Footnotes:

  1. A creature with the head of a human, the body of a lion, and occasional wings of a bird.
  2. A race of half-human, half-fish creatures. I acknowledged them first at Disney’s Little Mermaid film, a different type of them in Starbucks Logo also in Harry Potter in the Goblet of Fire.
  3. A creature that has the upper body of a human with the lower body of a horse.
  4. To differentiate with Echidna we know as one monotreme order of egg-laying mammals that belongs to the family Tachyglossidae. This Echidna was a monster, half-woman and half snake, who lived alone in a cave, she was also the mother of monsters.
  5. Traditionally depicted as an anthropomorphic creature with goat's head.
  6. Half-bird, half-woman creature of Greek mythology, who lured sailors to their deaths with their singing voices.
  7. Medusa was a monster, a Gorgon, generally described as a winged human female with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those who gazed upon her face would turn to stone.

HOMEOPATHY MEDICINE
Homeopathy is not a plausible system of treatment, as its dogmas about how drugs, illness, the human body, liquids, and solutions operate is contradicted by a wide range of discoveries across biology, psychology, physics, and chemistry made in the two centuries since its invention.

Today, we look for a more natural approach to self-care. Homeopathic remedies have become increasingly popular for everyday ailments, aromatic herbs and oils, including essential oils. Essential oils have had a wide range of uses and have been an important source of treatment for thousands of years and have been an integral part of the spiritual practices of many religions and cultures throughout history. Antibiotics were developed in the early 20th century and what people think of as modern medicine is relatively very recent when compared to homeopathic practices.

Can we take the essence of the cockroach to sustain our lives?

REVERSED DRAUGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
An Idea of Making Cockroach Roller Ball Remedy

What a great solution to a nagging problem. Try as they might, the “hidden powers that be” just can’t seem to get rid of these pesky savages. Even after years of violent genocide, these ancient noble creatures still just can’t seem to take a hint. That’s why we are experimenting with a very interesting discovery, from this tiny little friend. Simply use it as a topical ointment or inhale to maintain feelings of clear airways and easy breathing.

END your days of desperate isolation and become a fancy immortal creature ever!

Making DIY essential oils are easier than you think. You can go the route of buying a copper still, but that is expensive, so we did it with a crock pot!

The essential oil is a volatile material derived from a plant, and it usually bears the odours or flavour of that plant. Although a few animal-derived aromatic products exist (mainly musk, civet, and ambergris), the ones of botanical origin are far more numerous. Like fixed oils (vegetable oil, motor oil), these substances are generally liquids; they won’t mix with water, and they are soluble in many organic solvents.

CHEATSHEETS TO THE ANCIENT WAYS OF MAKING YOUR OWN OIL BLEND

Not only the material world is full of danger - the spiritual path too has many pitfalls and perils. This blends aims more at spiritual protection, to safeguard those who are susceptible to otherworldly powers and who are easily overwhelmed or taken advantage of by spiritual entities. It must be understood however, that herbs do not have the power to prevent Karma from unfolding, though they may assist recognition of one's own role within the cosmic drama and they may assist in clearing energy blockages and help you attune to the purpose.

35 drops of Essence of The Speckled Cockroach (Nauphoeta cinerea)
17 drops of Clary Sage Essential Oil (Salvia sclarea)
13 drops of Amaranth Seed CO2 Extract (Amaranthus retroflexus)
10 drops of Fennel Essential Oil (Foeniculum vulgare)
10 drops of Bergamot Extract (Citrus bergamia)

Carrier Oils:
4 ⅞ drops of Baobab Seed Oil (Adansonia digitata)
4 ¾ drops of Cold Pressed Evening Primrose Oil (Oenothera biennis)

Mix those ingredients carefully into a blue bottle or jar for daily use.

CLARY SAGE (Salvia sclarea)
Clary Sage is associated with vision. It is used to clear not only the physical eye, but also the third eye of the clairvoyant prior to channelling or divination. It lifts the spirit and helps detachment from emotionally difficult or painful situations. It is also means “for clear eyes” a medieval ancient remedy for blurred vision and eye strain.

AMARANTH (Amaranthus retroflexus)
Amaranth oil is a truly unique edible oil because it contains some of the highest concentration of a natural compound known as squalene.
The meaning of amaranth is “immortal”, as in the old days is was considered to be a real flower of immortality because of its many benefits. The ancient people of Mexico used the seeds as part of their staple diet, together with corn and beans.

FENNEL (Foeniculum vulgare)
Fennel has many uses in western folklore and magick. Roman soldiers chewed the seeds before battle to build confidence and courage. For protection, fennel was hung over the doorway on Midsummer Eve to keep away evil and the seeds put into keyholes to keep out ghosts. As it imbued with magical powers of protection, an infusion of fennel makes a good door wash to keep away intruders.

BERGAMOT (Citrus bergamia)
Bergamot is used to invoke the sun. It dispels the demons of despondency and depression and clears mind and spirit. Like other citrus oils, it can be used to boost self-confidence. It protects against negative influences and can help connecting to the higher self and purpose. An excellent oil for stress related problems, such as uptightness and tension headaches, cold sores, and for cases where stress negatively affects the digestive system. It stimulates appetite and aids digestion. Bergamot is relaxing and comforting, yet stimulating. It can help overcome depression, anxieties and fear.

EVENING PRIMROSE OIL (Oenothera biennis)
An herb of the new world, Evening Primrose has long been valued for its healing properties, which border on the miraculous. It is a lunar herb well known to ally women's conditions It opens its flowers and releases its scent at twilight. Similar to Borage oil, Evening Primrose oil also deserves its reputation as a magic tonic. Rich in Gamma Linoleic Acids (more than 10%), vitamins and minerals such as calcium and magnesium, it is highly regarded for its revitalising properties.

BAOBAB SEED OIL (Adansonia digitata)
There are numbers of stories and myths about the Baobab tree. Its odd appearance, with its branches looking more like roots, has given rise to the belief that it grows upside down. It is believed that spirits gather in its branches and it has strong connections with the African ancestor cult. Occasionally, the hollow trunks are used as birthing chambers or even tombs. Yet, it is also regarded as a tree of fertility and life and often a repository of life-giving water. Thus, in many African tribal cults, it plays a role in the mysteries of life, death and regeneration.

CULT OF COSMIC COCKROACHES

According to ancient lore, trees are inhabited by divine beings known as the tree dweller or ‘Penunggu Pohon’ in Bahasa Indonesia, who embody their souls. They are the keepers of nature's wisdom. Each type of tree speaks through its own particular keeper and each holds the key to its own special aspect of this arcane Earth wisdom.

Whereas, plants and other beings nourish and feed us, add spice to our life, bestow health and beauty, scent and colour, and brighten our days. They mediate love, hope, and gratitude; they clothe and cleanse us. They heal and soothe our bodies, minds and souls. They touch every aspect of our existence, from our daily sustenance to the air we breathe, to the keys to other dimensions. They are the alchemists that turn sunlight into the green force of life, continuously revolving, restoring, rebirthing through the cycles of time. They truly are the greatest gift of nature, yet also the one we most take for granted.

To connect with the mother nature, we have to seek The Rainbow. The Rainbow has been introduced into our lives through a multitude of mediums, but it started with the children’s cartoons, although some cartoons introduces rainbow through the story of Noah’s Ark and the other is Leprechaun at the end of the Rainbow. Most of the cartoon programmes portrays the Rainbow was something that brought light, love, peace and happiness into lives.

However, not only with chakras, auras, and spiritual beings, Rainbow also remind us to the outcast / queers we meet in natures, the cockroach; as their history of sexuality coherent to the spirit of rainbow flag. The cockroach was misunderstood as a threat in the mother earth turns it is an ethereal being. In order to charge your life with the cosmic energy, thus you ought to unlearn your mind. Energy will follow through. Honour the cockroach as you as an offering to the earth as you honour the spiritual dimension of the manifest universe.

To connect with the higher power, the divine being, we borrow the recipe of our ancestors’ tradition to connect with the natural spirits. We believe in an essential oils calls to their realm to ask for protection, good fortune, love, or peace, and to banish all evil demons from one’s personal aura, the Rainbow, strengthening the psychic shield of protection in this time of peril.

    #COCKROACHES

    LOVE LETTER TO COCKROACHES

    Dear Cockroaches,

    There always seems to be a sense of embarrassment when guest found cockroaches in our house like there is always a sense of embarrassment when presenting my idea to the public. I always fear. But when I look upon you, though it is strange to watch you sometimes–tiny little friend that often found dead upside down in my room, the way that you rage is somehow intriguing, so much power, so much weakness. I am terrified by the possibility of you.
    There has always been a construction of myths, of old wives’ tales, of people listening to certain kind of music from Death Metal to Dangdut, of people had bad tattoos, of groups girls graduated from a national ranked university having perfect collections of insta posts, of people who had their hair dreadlocked and wears only red, green, and yellow colour and of slang by the lower marginalised classes in their own communities. Practicing alternative ways of doing things might be a good reaction as questioning the embodied fears, stigmas and knowledge.

    We might grow up with societal roots which brought us here, way we existed today in this semio-capitalist, controlled, way of existing. We can question this down by breaking down what is seen as perfection and systemised life. It’s hard to pull apart when we know down that what we have known as a bad idea is always negative or useless to us.

    None of these horror I knew anything until I realise our lives depend on whose authorised to decide fact and fiction. I have no opinions towards debauchery, how about you cockroaches?

    Science was put above herbal remedies because Mum only trust doctors and pharmaceutical medication, my Mum has power whilst my Dad doesn’t care if he drinks fake Aqua because he got no money. Mum claims that she was an Atheist whilst at the same time smirks at Dad’s weird church who distribute Hebrew newsletters on Sunday.
    I once was had a family driver, I saw him drinking debris of cigarette ashes mixed with water when he left alone by his different–religion girlfriend and he knew he will end his life soon. Both Mum and Dad don’t go to church these days but I know they still believe in the afterlife because they threw a sermon and funeral upon our family driver’s death. Mum won’t let me had myself a tattoo, but Dad has one, and Mum’s married Dad anyway.

    If life is stranger than fiction, then fiction is stranger than speculation, then speculation is stranger than life.
    I see it as a loop.

    Societal roots that we grew up with might have a belief of the ancient fiction call religion, but each religion has its own embodied storytelling structure. I sometimes cried behind my cat eye glasses out of rationality and the way my friends says as rational.

    Every beings have their own flesh-made soap opera which sometimes are spine shuddering and insightful. Dark womb of terrible ecstasies. I dreamt of having an ability to do parthenogenesis as well as not possessing a nociceptor.

    Glitch and vermins like this tiny friend we known as a pest in daily lives seemingly might not a proper thing to brought up into a proper lifestyle. But rethinking about you my tiny friend may bring me onto another paradise, a pure imagination, the land that tonic of immortal life exist.

    Dear Cockroaches, I know that I don’t know how to communicate with you and I know you mostly not from you but from the cautionary tales and sometimes the myth traverse through my screen of iOs. These audacious claim seemed utterly fantastical and maybe a little bit delusional upon this crash cultural kitsch that I might see as a sad humour in the future.

    I dedicate this to you, a book that accompanied by personal account, fictions, essays, adaptations, and quasi-conversations, forming a multi-faceted exegesis behaviour while studying and befriending the cockroach.

    Yours Sincerely,

    Your friend

    Pest to Power is a collection of stories and exegesis written for those taste is for the macabre, the sick, outrageous, the unexpected, and horrifying. The stories resemble our worries and fear, as we try to speculate the future through the lives of cockroach, the living fossils. The question, then, is raised: how do we implement these stories of cockroach for the future? How do we study cockroach—a creature that we believed carrying diseases for many centuries? How do we unlearn the evolutionary trait of cockroach, and as a human, develop a collective kinship for a more eco-centric future?

    Speculating the future through cockroach is imagining lives between realities and distant fantasies that might take us out of our world to occupy a new—if temporary—situation and have the ability to ask from there: what if things were rendered differently? How could things work? What would that feel like when cockroach goes from vermin to friends? If so, will we live on a healthier, cleaner and a more collaboratively interesting planet?

    Now, the future.

    Will the future hold its accountability for the human and nonhuman being to be more sustainable? Who owns the future? Who benefits from the idea of the future?

    Here, we look at the possibility of unlearning human evolution for manufacturing future by gaining knowledge through the agency of cockroaches. What is considered as pest might be a key to lead the sustainable future? Being marginalized for thousand of years as a creature carrying diseases and treated as a fearsome species by the human counterpart, cockroaches bear its agency as the only single species that could survive the many extinction events and epochal transformation. Moreover, the judgment toward cockroach is built by the hyper-sterilised semiocapitalism/biopolitics idea of ‘proper lifestyle’ in which overproduction of synthetic commodity and the human dis-attachment to waste generate cockroach as a peripheral creature outside the human sphere. When everything has to be related to the human activities, the filthy cockroaches are not part of nature. The human idea to differentiate nature and culture embrace the notion of speciesism for the cockroach.

    This is a science-quasi-fictional quest into the peculiar behaviour of cockroach that is constituted as an assemblage of nocturnal, habitable, homeopathic, and resourceful material to explore the idea of eco-centric futurism—which means the human is not the centre of everything.

    What we, human, can learn from cockroach? What can cockroach learn from human? What is the method of reciprocity for human and nonhuman agency? Could this book address this issue? As the manifesto of xenofeminism argues, the future is not only for the child, but it is also a landscape for the nonhuman. When we start thinking less anthropocentric, we think more ecological. The future is cockroach.

    PEST TO POWER
    by Natasha Tontey

    WRITTEN, CREATIVE DIRECTION & GRAPHIC DESIGN BY
    Natasha Tontey

    WEB DEVELOPER & CODING BY
    ScriptMedia

    3D DEVELOPER
    DDDBandidos Studio

    3D CHARACTERS CAST
    Babam
    The Society of Cockroaches
    Teuku Mirza Arief

    MUSIC
    Sawi Lieu (Pasaraya & Future Collective)

    SPEECH OF THE SOCIETY OF COCKROACH
    Appropriated from the speech performed and written by Yasser Arafat’s 1974 UN General Assembly Speech and Sukarno 1955 Bandung Conference.

    LANGUAGE OF THE COCKROACHES HAS BEEN TRANSLATED BY
    The Institute of Human Studies

    This project is supported and developed during Web Residency by Akademie Schloss Solitude and The ZKM | Center for Art and Media

    PROCESS
    NATASHA TONTEY2019