200 Imperfect fingers modelled on a full-body soft armour
are pointing at someone… is that you?
“I wonder if nothing happened tomorrow” replies the dog.
Sterre’s work gives value to the devalued, both aesthetically and conceptually. Emerging as a monstrous femme creature with rotating manicured fingers and accompanied by a talking cyborg dog, the artist makes room for exploring and exploding the power structures that silently – although violently – regulate our lives.
We are asked to get closer… but do we really want to talk?
Quirky intimacy between the performer and the public is enacted as a method to confront our anxieties around normalcy and look into what most frightens or excites us. As the public interacts unconventionally with the desired object – an ‘unnatural’ body – also our notions of ‘heterosexual alignment’, integrity and wellness fall apart and reveal themselves as criticisable fictions.
When approaching this tentacular entity, the binarisms speech/non-speech, human/monster,nature/cyborg,life/death, (wo)man/animal, dynamism/stasis are troubled and dismantled. These debris allow for an autonomous, affectively charged time and space to emerge and alter our personal lived experiences and collective consciousness. Abjection and desire are at work in this moment to analyse our own preconceived understandings and perceptions of sexual desire and power dynamics.
In here, we can let go.
Text written by Giulia Casalini - PHD candidate Feminist Live Art at the University of Roehampton
1 hour performance body mask with 200 servomotors animating the satin like skin during Rijksakademie OpenStudio (video) Everyday this walk and talk pop up performance during the Rijksakademie Open Studio, the title
changed as well as the structure of the performance.
Starting from the habitat "enchanted field research - secret meetings that shape the world" in a glass box, like old Dutch master painters portraying the search of human anatomy, now the cyborg anatomy was being transfixed on the hosting body, stiffening it up, dehabilitating the movement of it’s host, transported on tap dance shoes. From
this start of this journey I started moving to the performance space; starting with the metamorphose from human to transhuman. Inspired by Testuo (the iconic Japanese cyberpunk film about the merging from human and machine), the female hulk, women binding each others in restrictive corsets, the becoming of this being became part of the performance.
I researched how anger effects women on a neurological level. The fingers that pierce through the skin like maggots, are imperfect and come from the manicure industry and were sourced from a Chinese shop in Amsterdam called “fantasy world”, all adding to the consciousness of the materiality used, adding the narrative of the body mask. All the fingers are connected to servomotors and an arduiono computer animating the skin of the monstrous femme being.
When entering the final performance space a wordvomit or mental rand erupted from my mind, tapping into a subconscious madness, blinded by suppressed anger, it was fully improvised. The daily changing title of the performance ranging from "g-string theory - stranded stand up" to "pointing sisters guilt trip - blame game gain" informed the content and relationship to the audience participating.
Performed at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, III The Hague, Stampa W139 Amsterdam, Buitenplaats Doornenburg for Art & Science Maarssen, Amsterdam Art Week at Kers Gallery and Exhibited at 38CC DelftThe work has been published in NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, Parool, Metropolis M, Stampa Talkshow hosted by Sacha Bronwasser and Govert Meit
are pointing at someone… is that you?
“I wonder if nothing happened tomorrow” replies the dog.
Sterre’s work gives value to the devalued, both aesthetically and conceptually. Emerging as a monstrous femme creature with rotating manicured fingers and accompanied by a talking cyborg dog, the artist makes room for exploring and exploding the power structures that silently – although violently – regulate our lives.
We are asked to get closer… but do we really want to talk?
Quirky intimacy between the performer and the public is enacted as a method to confront our anxieties around normalcy and look into what most frightens or excites us. As the public interacts unconventionally with the desired object – an ‘unnatural’ body – also our notions of ‘heterosexual alignment’, integrity and wellness fall apart and reveal themselves as criticisable fictions.
When approaching this tentacular entity, the binarisms speech/non-speech, human/monster,nature/cyborg,life/death, (wo)man/animal, dynamism/stasis are troubled and dismantled. These debris allow for an autonomous, affectively charged time and space to emerge and alter our personal lived experiences and collective consciousness. Abjection and desire are at work in this moment to analyse our own preconceived understandings and perceptions of sexual desire and power dynamics.
In here, we can let go.
Text written by Giulia Casalini - PHD candidate Feminist Live Art at the University of Roehampton
1 hour performance body mask with 200 servomotors animating the satin like skin during Rijksakademie OpenStudio (video) Everyday this walk and talk pop up performance during the Rijksakademie Open Studio, the title
changed as well as the structure of the performance.
Starting from the habitat "enchanted field research - secret meetings that shape the world" in a glass box, like old Dutch master painters portraying the search of human anatomy, now the cyborg anatomy was being transfixed on the hosting body, stiffening it up, dehabilitating the movement of it’s host, transported on tap dance shoes. From
this start of this journey I started moving to the performance space; starting with the metamorphose from human to transhuman. Inspired by Testuo (the iconic Japanese cyberpunk film about the merging from human and machine), the female hulk, women binding each others in restrictive corsets, the becoming of this being became part of the performance.
I researched how anger effects women on a neurological level. The fingers that pierce through the skin like maggots, are imperfect and come from the manicure industry and were sourced from a Chinese shop in Amsterdam called “fantasy world”, all adding to the consciousness of the materiality used, adding the narrative of the body mask. All the fingers are connected to servomotors and an arduiono computer animating the skin of the monstrous femme being.
When entering the final performance space a wordvomit or mental rand erupted from my mind, tapping into a subconscious madness, blinded by suppressed anger, it was fully improvised. The daily changing title of the performance ranging from "g-string theory - stranded stand up" to "pointing sisters guilt trip - blame game gain" informed the content and relationship to the audience participating.
Performed at Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam, III The Hague, Stampa W139 Amsterdam, Buitenplaats Doornenburg for Art & Science Maarssen, Amsterdam Art Week at Kers Gallery and Exhibited at 38CC DelftThe work has been published in NRC Handelsblad, Volkskrant, Parool, Metropolis M, Stampa Talkshow hosted by Sacha Bronwasser and Govert Meit