At a time that nations and national identities are being intensively challenged, our film, Pornified Homes, examines the constellations of online male prostitution, as well as the transnational, transmedia, and interscalar architecture through which they exist. It uncovers an urbanism of coordinated escort apartments, online profiles, district transformations, and bodily reconstructions rooted in the colonial tradition through which the ecosystems of the Amazon are contained and mobilised as exoticised components of domestic environments, and in which tags of sexualised exotic demarcations become the engine of migratory redomestications that face off emancipation and subjugation against each other.
One of the most primitive extant flowers on Earth, Victoria amazonica was one of the first flowering species to branch off the main trunk of plant evolution. Its extensive system of floating leaves occupies the surface of Amazonian water bodies, crowding out competitors so that its roots can colonise large tracts of undisputed soil.
Due to lack of light and movement, river and lake bottoms in the Amazon basin accumulate carbon dioxide, making conditions difficult for life. The thorny stalks of Victoria amazonica connect its floating parts to its rooted ones, transporting the oxygen needed to keep its root system alive. The flower of the species blooms for only two days, and during its brief period of pollination it changes gender.
When it first opens, in the darkness of the nocturnal rain forest, it is a luminous white and broadcasts an intense fragrance. This multisensory billboard attracts Cyclocephala castanea beetles that have often traveled, borne on the wind, more than kilometres. They bring with them the pollen of the distant Victoria flowers on which they spent the previous night. The warm and comfortable environment of the floral chamber attracts as many as twenty beetles. After they enter the flower closes due to the nocturnal drop in temperature.
In such a crowded and comfortable interior, beetles find unfamiliar partners to copulate with. With the sunrise, the flower changes gender and turns pink. The flowers remain closed for another few hours, but now the pollen-laden stigmas warm up, attracting the beetles to the upper part of the flower. Only when the beetles are covered with pollen does the flower open again, releasing them to the morning wind that will take them to new and distant locations, where the genes of their host will find new exotic glowing chambers of unfamiliar sex.
