DRAINED
by Cheshta Kela
The research is an exploration of obsession, bodily exploitation, and survival within an economy where blood plasma functions as currency, exposing the psychological and socioeconomic ethics of a world that commodifies humanity.
Film Logline: In a future where blood plasma is currency, a loyal donor descends into obsession, sabotaging others and destroying their body to climb the ranks, only to face a heartbreaking truth about the system they’ve been feeding all along.
Drained is a research-led speculative project that explores the ethics, systems, and spatial politics of blood plasma donation. Sparked by my brother’s regular donations, the project led me into the fragile and largely invisible global network where plasma is extracted from people, processed as commodity, and circulated as both medicine and market.
This isn’t just a future imagined; it’s a present extended. Today, the U.S. supplies most of the world’s plasma through paid donations, largely from low-income individuals. In contrast, the UK relies on voluntary systems. But as demand grows and health systems face increasing pressure, the question becomes: when do incentives shift into requirements?
Drained traces the spatial implications of this shift. The waiting room is no longer passive but it’s a site of quiet extraction. Machines assign value. Interiors discipline bodies. The architecture of care becomes an architecture of control.
The project critically examines how survival is mediated through infrastructures, how biology becomes currency, and how systems extract not only from the body, but through it.