Saiaragaz - honey, you're no seabunny

Sairagaz, Honey
You're no Seabunny
solo exhibition at Joe Ramone 2016

The purpose of a mythic narrative is to make the
world intelligible, using magical means to re-
solve the contradictions of life.*

Sairagaz is at the etymological base for the word
sorry and means “sad”. Sea bunnies are actual
slugs, living on the bottom of the sea. Sometimes
what comes from deep down needs to bubble up.
All the work in this first solo exhibition of
Mette Sterre has been made in the past year when
she was living on the 24th floor of the Balfron
Tower, a brutalist high rise in East London. In
this world she has felt just right; surround-
ed by clouds, the skyline of the bursting city
of London. Here she has gathered her thoughts
and imagination of a quickly gentrifying city
and its abundance of flora and fauna; growing up
and resisting this; giving her space to reflect
and recreate her own world, without disturbance.
Mette Sterre’s work is all about creating a strat-
egy for the escape room that is called life. In
this proposed meta-narratives she creates body-
masks in the shape of costumes that are characters
that are brought to life in a performance as well
as autonomous sculptures.
Sterre’s work in general deals with the grotesque:
the world of topsy-turvy, the uncanny and the para-
dox. Inspired by the repetitive patterns in nature,
sociology and cultural history in the field of horror
movies, she has been focussing on the grotesque body.


* Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss

By the de-identification of the human body, she
addresses the stigmatization of difference, ques-
tioning the social construction of identity by
blurring the boundaries between the inanimate and
the animate, gender and object and subject. She
does this by creating sculptural costumes, giv-
ing birth to new forms of living beings. She an-
thropomorphises everyday objects by using them
as her main material source. These “body masks”
construct anti-characters, made out of unusual
materials like ceramics, rubber bands, ball pit
balls or gift bows.
An important element in her practice is endur-
ance. It’s in the production as well as in the
wearing of the costumes. These creatures are made
through an elaborate period of intense repetitive
labour. They can take up to half a year to be
constructed. They cover the wearer from head to
toe, covering the face and restricting movement
and eyesight. They are heavy and hot to wear; all
these limitations add up to their transformative
power, covering up gender, background and race.
Sterre believes there’s a strong connection with
the manual labour and the experience of becoming
these meta-bodies, to perform another worldly be-
ing. It’s also a political act in these neoliber-
al times; to produce slowly and focussed on one
project for a long duration of time.
Mette Sterre’s performances are developed through
a process of trial and error, with a lot of time
for experiment through playfulness. The move-
ment of the creatures is developed in close re-
lationship with the wearer, for-mostly dancers
or physical performers.