I'm a visual artist, working with site-specific installation, text, drawing and publishing to explore the relationship between the body, movement and language. Investigating the human body in designed systems, installations often take the form of ground works that are made through movement and open-ended processes that are contingent on spatial conditions, physical interaction and time.
Intervening in the normative mechanisms of communication and circulation, my work destabilizes the assumed neutrality and fixed nature of the built environment, language forms and behavior codes to experiment with how given structures can be re-imagined by generating a space for encounter and experience.
Z––A (Zuid – Al het andere) (Rotterdamse Dakendagen, Bovenop Zuid, Zuidplein Rooftop, Rotterdam, 2023) - The Maas river is added to the horizon, viewed from the Zuidplein rooftop. The river, which divides the South (Zuid) of Rotterdam from the rest of the city, is not just a geographic boundary between the center and the South, but also a psychological barrier. While the South of the city is chronically neglected by city policies, with evictions and ongoing gentrification affecting long-term residents, there are anecdotes of city councilors having never crossed the Maas. By adding the Maas to the horizon, the river takes its place alongside the other landmarks already visible from the Zuidplein rooftop. Along with Rotterdam icons; the Euromast, Harbour, Maassilo, Delftshaven and Het Park, it completes the picture of the city, but turns around the direction from where the city is usually read––positioning the viewer to take a new perspective from Zuid to all the rest.
The Same Ground (That Time, Tabakalera, Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain, 2023) - Vinyl floor work running throughout the exhibition and public spaces of Tabakalera. Commissioned along with a selection of works from the collection of the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, the installation functions as a temporal floor score, shifting between language and gesture. With no fixed orientation or direction, the work extends the exhibition through the buildings' walls and corridors, and requires movement to be viewed or read. It breaks in and out of grids and order, suggesting slippages in the linear, fixed structure of language and time––which can be understood as grammar temporarys for understanding the world––leaving as constant, perhaps, only the ground that holds us.
Open & Sneller (TENT, Rotterdam, 2022) - Chalk drawings for TENT, Rotterdam, formerly a school for girls and technical education. Testing the relationship between reading, writing, movement and time, the drawings expand from the history of the building to the city – where the title 'Open and faster', an improvised hand-written sign for bypassing a construction site blocking a cycling path – has been found. A raw building material in unfixed state, the chalk reflects on the upsurge of construction in Rotterdam over the last years, and shows the movement of visitors through the space, as the markings gradually spread and disintegrate through the duration of the exhibition.
Street Games (Hayward Gallery at Southbank Centre, London, 2021) - A composition of re-imagined street games, around the buildings of Southbank Centre. The project is based in the history of improvised and made up games, particularly by kids in urban neighborhoods without designated parks, forced to play in the street––implicating city planning and gentrification. I devised different compositions that reference existing street games such as hop scotch, ball games, and a local historical dance called The Lambeth Walk; a working class walking dance from the 1930's. Simple instructions are given as starting points for games and movements that are open-ended, with uneven ground markings leaving space for players to make up rules as they go. Games are non-linear, asymmetrical and expansive, with organic lines crossing over architectural spaces, allowing the Southbank site to be experienced and viewed from various perspectives.
Desire Lines (NDSM-Werf, 2020) - A site specific work in which chalk lines, curves and shapes connect the various spaces that make up NDSM Werf. These markings act like a language or mark-making system, made in response to the use and rhythms of the area. The markings in turn affect how the space is used, as pedestrians, bikes and cars respond to the non-directional, non-instructional markings, referring to 'desire lines' as informal pathways created through the intuitive use of a space over time.
The carpenter of your neighbourhood (Published by Dolce, Athens, 2020) - A publication investigating the abundance of makeshift paper flyers and notices in
public space within a local context – the Athenian neighbourhood of Nea Ionia. The
book includes translations of collected flyers and posters into English, and documents
anonymous phone conversations – made by calling phone numbers listed on the
hand-posters flyers in the neighbourhood. As an experimental entry into the local
conditions of information and exchange, the project reflects on social and economic
conditions of work, leisure and exchange in an attempt to draw a socio-psychological
portrait of Nea Ionia, a district in north-western Athens. Each copy of the book is
printed and compiled by hand, according to a set of instructions, at a local copy shop
in Athens, therefore using the same standard colours of paper and format as posters
and flyers found on the streets that they come from.
Snakes and Ladders (A5 Project Space, Amzei 5, Bucharest, Romania, 2019) - A steel installation, made out of gas pipes found around buildings in Bucharest. The structure references the board game 'Snakes and Ladders', a vertical game of chance in which the goal is to climb to the top to win. From the outside of the gallery the construction looks like an empty billboard structure, commonly found in the city, suggestive of economic and political shifts and downturns. Upon entering the space, the structure turns into a playground that can be engaged with. The structure is painted the pastels of former communist apartment blocks in the city.
Floralien (Biënnale Van België, Floraliënhal, SMAK, Ghent, 2019) - An exploded alphabet, written with a sports field chalk line marker in 100kg of flour, in response to the expansive 600m2 hall formerly used for flowers and garden shows.
Move Along (Published by Onomatopee, Eindhoven, 2018) - An instruction manual for open ended games, actions and interventions. The book outlines simple instructions for twelve activities that anybody can take part in with minimal means. The activities generate conditions in which specific situations can be disrupted and reimagined through intuition, play, improvisation and negotiation, and for direct experience of the potential of collaborative and independent agency in making up your own rules.
ABCs (Design Museum Ghent, 2017) - The alphabet is written in chalk with a sports field line marker on the road in front of the Design museum Gent - an in-between space between private and public. The performance is based on road 'screed' marking, a technique used for the freehand lettering of official signs and warnings on roads. As a kind of 'writing with the body', the idiosyncrasies of human shaped letters become part of the alphabet as a holder of language. Misshapen letters remain and are repeated, so that it becomes a 'test' alphabet, placing the focus on the body within a designed system of language to which it tries to adapt through movement.
