Light Bodies, Heavy Feet imagines a fictitious evolution of a kind of aquatic, planktonic human-algae chimeras which undertakes a metamorphosis impelled by environmental pressure. The work is plaited from the organisms’ visceral encounter with transmutation and evolutionary biology. Originally inhabitants of the sea, they have gradually expelled themselves from waters, as well as unneeded tissues and fluids from their bodies.
The chimeras’ bodily and mental toil as an adaptive response to the altered environment is contextualized within the “New Synthesis” framework, a combination of Darwinian natural selection and genetics, advocated to defy hierarchy of races and species in early conceptions of evolution in the
twentieth century.
A species’ existence is not a predetermination but grows out of contingencies and its innate evolvability. The concept of convergent evolution is also deployed to connecting dots between the fictive and palpable world, being the process whereby organisms not closely related, independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar ecological niches.