Bodymasks
g string theory- pointing sisters blame game at III The Hague
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Sterre’s creations escape fixed definitions. They exceed performance practice, installation, digital technologies, costume-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. She researches social-political issues that she translates into body-mask-based performances. These can end up taking the shape of street parades, white cube performances, theatre shows or immersive performative installations. Mette researches how far we can contort and skew the ‘natural’ human body in order to establish a new form of ‘ethics’. Manouvering through the fields of the “figital (digital meets physical)“, the glitch manifesto, queer phenemonology and neuroscience, the binarisms speech/non-speech, human/monster, nature/cyborg, life/death, (wo)man/animal, dynamism/stasis are troubled and dismantled. By creating labour-intensive sculptural costumes or “body masks”, bordering on the uncanny and the grotesque, she uses folkloric and carnivalesque traditions of temporary autonomous spaces, myths, and legends in a playful way. Through these elements, she investigates the notion of materiality, intuition, feminism, social anxiety, and their impact on the (non) human body. Her sculptural body masks cover the wearer from head to toe, covering the face and restricting movement and eye-sight. They are heavy and hot to wear; all these limitations add up to their transformative power, covering up gender, background, and race. The way in which the complex body masks restrict and permit movement forms the basis of her performances, installations, and films. Sterre investigates how the human contour can be disturbed in the broadest sense, both ideologically and materially, in order to question what more we can be, beyond human beings; avowing to remove the privileged thinking of the human as the Master of the Universe. Utilising her DIY prosthetics, her work is a call-to-arms to break away from the Western obsession with the sanctity of the human form. Mette’s plea is to co-exist with technology, to ally with it, and fashion new ‘assemblages’, following the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the body without organs. She believes there's a strong connection between the manual labor of making the body masks and the experience of becoming these meta bodies. Producing something otherworldly, tangible, and frictional experience by hand. Acting as a strategy for disorientation, de-centering and trespassing spatial parameters, linear time, and human certainties. When pertaining to her material research she investigates motion by humans and non-humans. Anthropomorphising accessible materials as a political act of resistance; to produce in a time-consuming and labor-intensive way, Mette shows the body's ability to take ownership. This debris allows for an autonomous, affectively charged time and space to emerge and alter our personal lived experiences and collective consciousness. A narrative is developed through play and improvisation. Abjection and desire are at work in this moment to analyse our own preconceived understandings and perceptions. In here, we can let go. |
