The work was developed from Boedi Widjaja’s 2025 performance-lecture of the same name premiered as part of Vortex by MACA Art Centre, curated by Jin Feng, at Fotografiska Shanghai. Boedi approaches history as a living contagion, exploring how memory, trauma, and language act as vectors through which the past persists, spreads, and mutates. Structured around a dialogue between the artist and the living cell DX/XD, the work intertwines this conversation with a constellation of narratives—diasporic Chinese experiences during the Cold War, Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s letters, and Boedi’s familial history. The result is an intimate, sometimes uncanny encounter, where pasts infiltrate the present, revealing how identities and histories are both inherited and performed.

Through its multimodal form, the work collapses storytelling, performative gesture, and poetic reflection, positioning the audience as active participants in the transmission of memory. This is made literal through an interactive component inviting visitors to “self-infect” with synthetic DNA encoding Boedi’s poem, blurring the boundary between biological and cultural inheritance. By emphasizing the materiality of history—its capacity to seep, replicate, and resonate—Boedi prompts reflection on the affective, bodily, and ethical dimensions of historical experience. The piece asserts that history is never inert: it is active, viral, and deeply entangled with questions of diaspora, belonging, and the persistent echoes of geopolitical and familial legacies.