“He deserves the world,” says Constantine Kaloutas, a half-human, half-fan-throated lizard otherwise referred to as ἄnthromorph. In 2021, the artist received a notification that Rick Owens had donated £5,000 to a GoFundMe account she had created to assist subsidise the prices of facial feminisation surgery. “He was one among my biggest donors after which he reached out for a photoshoot – working together was amazing.” Despite never having met before, the duo approach fashion (be it traditional clothing or SFX) as a technique to re-think and transgress the human body. It’s about liberating people from their fleshy confines and providing them with a vessel for transhuman change. Or, as ἄnthromorph puts it, “exploring post-human identity and redefining the binaries of human versus non-human, technology versus nature, and male versus female.”

An initial fascination with that vile, membranous prison – the human skin – led Kaloutas into prop-making, after which into sculpture, after which into costume design, which she’d use for online performance art. “I like humanising weird, earthling bodies and introducing them to my audience,” she says. Inspired by pre-historic life forms, her creations seem like the rogue experiments of a mad scientist gone fallacious: glutinous amphibians and cross-bred creatures which are neither alien, mammal, nor reptile. Seldom are there eye sockets or respiratory holes, but there are many exposed brains and Jurassic tails and cluttered fangs. 

But Koulatas’ mutants are also coy and vulnerable, photographed in kittenish poses on the sting of a lagoon or hidden inside wooded thickets. “It’s like a type of art therapy which helps me take care of gender dysphoria. It’s allowed me to integrate the female behaviours I had at all times been suppressing,” she says. Before she had begun to medically transition, it was those silicone exoskeletons that first brought Kaloutas closer in line to herself. “Every mask was an try and beautify my trans body and hybridise with nature. In nature, you usually are not queer you’re just ‘you’. I discovered being closer to a shape-shifting animal gave me comfort. It was a gateway for me to transition and has grown and adjusted with me.”

In this manner, ἄnthromorph – the Instagram character and the IRL alter-ego – chimes with what Donna Haraway was talking about when she wrote A Cyborg Manifesto in 1985. The essay described how technology had blurred the lines between the natural and the factitious and questioned how our bodies may be reborn from the mixing of those boundaries. “Our perception of humanness has separated us from nature,” Kaloutas says. “We’re disconnected from the rhythms of the land and so we’ve changed into cancerous organisms. My work advocates for a human body that’s interconnected to the earth.” Just as Kaloutas has split herself into “Constantine” and “ἄnthromorph”, she continues to atomise herself across the ether, reckoning with the bounds of her own consciousness via technospiritual and cyber shamanic meme-making.

“We’re an extension of the entire,” she adds. “I don’t relate to the human experience, I would really like to be an animal.” But we are able to no quicker abandon humanity than we are able to return to a time before phones had cameras: each step we take towards technological progress gets etched into stone like a palaeolithic rune. In interrogating the connection between current tech and past mythologies, Kaloutas’ work imagines a world where primordial ecosystems and cyborgian futures grow and mutate amongst themselves – a speculative place where humankind may be reborn and rescued from staid binaries of nature versus culture and mind versus body. “I would really like to experience the world through different senses and paint latest images of reality,” she says. “I feel I’d wish to be a shapeshifter without end.”