The Amphibian: Science, Dysphoria, and the Province as a Laboratory for New Existences

The world we inhabit is composed of epistemological provinces: spaces where knowledge takes specific forms, grows autonomously, and opens unprecedented possibilities for imagining new ways of existing. Far from being a prison of thought, the province is a fertile laboratory, a refuge from which we can transcend imposed limits and explore uncharted connections between species, bodies, and affections. Bruno Latour taught us that science is not a temple of universal truths but a collective construction made of translations and mediations between human and non-human actors. Paul B. Preciado, meanwhile, speaks of dysphoria as an epistemological force, a state of transit between systems of meaning that we have not yet finished constructing. In this context, the amphibious condition—as proposed by Jorge Díaz—becomes a strategy to inhabit the province as a space where otherkin and transspecies love can flourish.

Dysphoria, understood not only as an individual experience but as a transformative power, allows us to imagine relationships that exceed conventional human frameworks. It is the opening to the possibility of hybrid affections, new sensitivities shared with other species, and kinships that do not depend on traditional biology but on reciprocity and coexistence. The amphibious and the dysphoric are, in this sense, two sides of the same creative force: the ability to mutate, to traverse worlds, to generate new forms of intimacy and belonging.

This artistic project starts from the idea that biology is not just a discipline but a poetic language, full of metaphors that can expand beyond laboratories. From the observation of cell migration in frog embryos to the collective survival strategy of amphibian singing, biology offers us alternative models for thinking about interspecies relationships. Jorge Díaz speaks of how migrating cells in vertebrate development do not follow a fixed hierarchy: they rotate, exchange roles, and inhibit individuality in favor of collectivity. In the singing of frogs, we find another organizing principle: a sound swarm that creates community and protection. What if we applied these principles to imagine new forms of love that transcend human identity?

Art is, in this sense, a device for exploring the province as an ecosystem of mutable affections. If science has been turned into a rigid, inaccessible language, if thought has been trapped in binary categories—male/female, human/animal, subject/object—, then art has the power to explode these boundaries. We are interested in an amphibious, dysphoric art, an art that does not seek to stabilize meanings but generates questions that force us to transit spaces of uncertainty and desire.

The amphibious condition is not just a biological metaphor; it is a gesture of openness. To inhabit the province is to dwell in the threshold between worlds, to recognize that identity, knowledge, and love are not fixed entities but processes in constant transformation. Dysphoria, in this sense, is not an error to be corrected but an opportunity to build other forms of community, to imagine new ecologies of affection and kinship. Like the neural crest cells that move together without leaders, like the synchronized singing of frogs that becomes unidentifiable, this project proposes an artistic practice that does not seek definitive answers but ways of being together without renouncing fluidity and mutation.

This is a call to think about science through art, to inhabit dysphoria without fear, to imagine the province not as a margin but as a fertile territory where transspecies and otherkin identities can thrive. Let’s us all be amphibians.