Mette Sterre: Fabulations for the End of the World
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Liminal encounters of mineral-looking entities in the dark
entangling and disentangling in unpredictable formations. A primal machine reaches out for touch – her skin is soft, and she is craving for love. Contacts. Collisions. Stillness. The atmosphere is saturated with elementary charge, animating all matter alike. Mette Sterre’s creations escape fixed definitions. They exceed performance practice, installation, digital technologies, body masks making and sculpture – potentially expanding their territories without limits. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: an unpredictable participatory and sensorial experience. The environments created by the artist are loaded with transformative energetic fields that animate new worlds in which we encounter organic and inorganic living organisms and speculative fictions. The undecipherable glowing matter unfolds in front of us. What is it made of? Animators in costumes, robots, sounds and visuals unravel in anarchic formalisms and otherworldly movements, acting as a strategy for disorientation, de-centering and trespassing spatial parameters, linear time and human certainties. Creatures that seem to be assembled into hybrid and chimeric formulations – partly machines, monsters or nonhumans – are occupying the same space as us. Rather than being ego-centered actors within a system that still oppresses those that are ‘less than human’, Sterre’s creations celebrate our variance through dissonance, in a dimension of both fear and ecstasy. Are we not hybrids yet? Formed of bacteria, minerals, fluids and parasites, we are also one with the environment, in a vitalistic, metamorphic processes. Simultaneously, we are slowly and surely also decomposing... In this ecosystem, even rocks have agency. Text by Giulia Casalini, phd candidate Feminist Live Art at the University of Roehampton, London |
Currently on Show
- An Octopus named If 38CC Delft 13th of May 2023 - 9th of July 2023 https://www.38cc.nl/an-octopus-named-if - On Marvellous Things, Kunsthal de Kade, Amersfoort 3 3rd of June - 3rd of September 2023 https://www.kunsthalkade.nl/en/current-and-expected/exhibitions/wonderbaarlijke-wezens - Vicious Circle Disco - Solo - CODA, Apeldoorn 25th of June till 17 September 2023 https://www.coda-apeldoorn.nl/nl/museum/mette-sterre-vicious-circle-disco-english - There is no Flesh - Solo - Summeracademy Salzburg, 19th of may - till 13th of June 2023 https://www.summeracademy.at/en/kurse/theres-no-flesh/ Public Performances 21st of June 2023, De Balie, Amsterdam 25th of June Opening CODA Apeldoorn 19th of July 2023 Performance SummerAcademy Salzburg Public Program 9th of July Finisage 38cc Delft symposium In the Media NRC https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/06/07/verontrustende-fantasieversies-van-de-karpathoskikker-en-witvleugeluil-a4166574 Tableau https://tableaumagazine.nl/de-tentakels-van-mette-sterre/ New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/arts/design/manifesta-kosovo-art.html |