Josephine Baan is an artist and educator based between Zurich and Rotterdam. They are interested in the complexities of collectivity and engage in art, education and collaboration as means to initiate creative survival. Josephine performs with their body and voice and makes installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, human and non-human bodies, and change and preservation. Materially and performatively thinking between things, beings and situations, they consciously switch perspective to influence roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care.
Their practice is closely linked to their work as educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical, collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam-based educational collective Friendly Stalking. As of 2020, Josephine co-runs Zurich-based School of Commons, a community-based initiative dedicated to the development of decentered knowledge.
Versed in the Void [the hole, the pool & the cracker] - Versed in the Void first emerged as a performance in the Turin spring of 2019, where it was developed in conversation with Amos Cappuccio and Chiara Cecconello over the tight span of two weeks. In 2020, this performance was reworked and restaged in collaboration with Kerem Akar and Ratri Notosudirdjo.
Versed in the Void articulates the complexities of collectivity, navigating the individual within the whole and attempting to formulate solidarity across difference. The void here refers to the inconceivability of the future as well as the space between any two subjectivities. These notions take on an added layer of meaning in light of the events of 2020, where a radically altered present coupled with enforced social distancing continues to widen the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them.’
Versed in the Void - Performance (25') and 3-channel audio piece (29') at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, 2019. Co-performed with Amos Cappuccio and Chiara Cecconello, sound by Amos Cappuccio. Versed in the Void articulates the inconceivability of a common future. Taking absence as its starting point, the voice acts as the inner body materialised in space and an indicator of presence; the mouth, a passage between exteriority and interiority. Darkness is hollow and potent, giving space for light to emerge. Traces and fragments dispersed throughout the room point towards transpired gestures and words whispered. They speak of inner worlds - dissociating from the desire to geographically locate oneself, instead urging to travel inwards.
Listen to the audio piece via: https://inter-archive.oncurating-space.org/Versed-in-the-Void-intro
MOTH: An Exit Wound - An Exit Wound is the fourth and final performance within my yearlong solo show: MOTH.
MOTH: The Big Chew - The Big Chew is the third of four seasonal performances within my yearlong solo show, MOTH. Now, the mouth opens. Gaping. An entrance. An exit. A gateway between organs and celestial bodies, thought and utterance, the finite gauging the infinite. A voice emerges, indicating, desiring presence. Demanding affirmation. Stuff goes in, stuff comes out all the time. The body is porous. The skin—the body’s largest organ—is absorbent and brittle. Barely a barrier between what is outside and what is inside. It draws in and oozes out. Vulnerable to dirt and radiation and touch and the soundwaves of words hitting its surface. Anything that brushes the epidermis eventually enters the body, where it remains, at least for some time. The point of entry is unclear (it is everywhere). Unclear too is where it seeps out, if it ever does (it might decide to settle). The lungs are a pump, a constant circulation of the exterior. Breathing as embodying, breathing as becoming place. You inhale your environment and breathe out your body. Orifices and cavities is really all there is—the body is a hole. A shell. Cavernous. Stubborn hollow organs and veins and ducts and liquids remarkably strung together, internalising the external and vice versa. To chew and excrete the world. To wear a mourning wreath woven from your own hair. To grab the soil and knead it into fistfuls of rage.
MOTH: The Big Chew - The Big Chew is the third of four seasonal performances within my yearlong solo show, MOTH.
Now, the mouth opens. Gaping. An entrance. An exit. A gateway between organs and celestial bodies, thought and utterance, the finite gauging the infinite. A voice emerges, indicating, desiring presence. Demanding affirmation.
Stuff goes in, stuff comes out all the time. The body is porous. The skin—the body’s largest organ—is absorbent and brittle. Barely a barrier between what is outside and what is inside. It draws in and oozes out. Vulnerable to dirt and radiation and touch and the soundwaves of words hitting its surface. Anything that brushes the epidermis eventually enters the body, where it remains, at least for some time. The point of entry is unclear (it is everywhere). Unclear too is where it seeps out, if it ever does (it might decide to settle).
The lungs are a pump, a constant circulation of the exterior. Breathing as embodying, breathing as becoming place. You inhale your environment and breathe out your body. Orifices and cavities is really all there is—the body is a hole. A shell. Cavernous. Stubborn hollow organs and veins and ducts and liquids remarkably strung together, internalising the external and vice versa. To chew and excrete the world. To wear a mourning wreath woven from your own hair. To grab the soil and knead it into fistfuls of rage.
MOTH: The Slumber - The Slumber is the second of four seasonal performances within my yearlong solo show: MOTH. Let’s dive deep for a moment, into the dark biosphere. Deep under the earth’s crust, where the PH levels are like battery acid, the temperatures are like the inside of a volcano, and the pressure is beyond compare. Seventy percent of our planets’ bacteria live there; some are millions of years old. The extreme lack of nutrients means they are barely alive; they are zombie microbes, feeding on rocks and water.
It is hard to describe some of this life in terms that we can even understand because they appear to be able to survive for such long periods of time with virtually no energy available. Nearly dead, they’re in a state of dormancy, which is a reversible state of low metabolic activity. It is a strategy for coping with a perpetual lack of energy, initiated by starvation or resource limitation. The metabolism is reserved mostly to essential functions such as biomolecular repair and replacement, rather than to support growth.
Under the neoliberal spell, sleepwalking is the new breathing. Long-dormant bacteria and viruses trapped in ice and permafrost for centuries are reviving as Earth's climate warms. In an economy that covets growth at the cost of anything, death is not a moment but a process. We’re living in the shadow of our own personal apocalypse. "Our inability to conceive a world without boundaries, our inability to imagine infinity, this is our basic illness." (Eugène Ionesco)
Photo credit: Maëlle Gross
MOTH: The Fall - “The Fall” is the first of four seasonal performances taking place within my year-long solo show: MOTH.
Falling throughout history serves as indicator for imminent change. An involuntary movement suspended in space, bound to end up somewhere, without the promise of a soft landing. After her abduction, Proserpina fell to Hades, and with every pomegranate seed she ate, called forth another month of darkness falling.
Above ground, the earliest written narratives of the Proserpina myth mark another fall; the cultural shift from matriarchal worship (of the Goddesses of the Earth) to patriarchal worship (of the Olympic Gods), vivifying the social codes of patriarchy that have been passed down to Western societies as part of their Hellenic heritage.
Some centuries later, we find ourselves free falling rapidly towards extinction. “What goes up?” they ask, pointing first to the earth, and then to the heavens.
Proserpina is also a moth species, lying dormant in their pupal stage for winter, quietly preparing herself for emergence in spring.
MOTH - MOTH - Installation shot. "We think we are singular but we are plural—a drop of water, swarming with life." Spanning a year in total, MOTH runs from October 2018 until October 2019. The exhibition acts as a time capsule in which material and immaterial processes take place, both visibly and invisibly. The unheated, open space in a rural area invites the weather, nature, and time to enter the space and take effect on the materials, as well as proposing a human as well as non-human audience. The works in the exhibition occupy the space as transient beings in slow motion, whose interdependencies offer musings on vulnerability, preservation and change. The exhibition is accompanied by four seasonal performances, signifying moments where words, ritual, gestures, and movement further influence the installation.
MOTH - Installation shot. "We think we are singular but we are plural—a drop of water, swarming with life."
Spanning a year in total, MOTH ran from October 2018 until November 2019. The exhibition acts as a time capsule in which material and immaterial processes take place, both visibly and invisibly. The unheated, open space in a rural area invites the weather, nature, and time to enter the space and take effect on the materials, as well as proposing a human as well as non-human audience. The works in the exhibition occupy the space as transient beings in slow motion, whose interdependencies offer musings on vulnerability, preservation and change.
The exhibition is accompanied by four seasonal performances, signifying moments where words, ritual, gestures, and movement further influence the installation.
Materials used: wood, plastic, copper, brass, aluminium, iron, magnets, marble, plastic foil, cement, stone, ‘lexicon der frau,’ hand blown glass, gallium, pewter, bismuth, burnt walnut shells, hand shaped candles, latex rubber, kitty litter, soil, seeds, peanuts, walnuts, tamarinds, silk worm cocoons, cigarette butts, Cheetos, graphite, wax, apples, pomegranates, vacuum wrapped compositions, vegetation, debris, bank cards, biro’s, bandages, sugar, salt, sugar water, honey, pond water, spittle, iv drips, plastic flowers, roses, duct tape, moth pupae.
A Brief History of Becoming Rock - Hard rock, hard technologies, harder capital. They look like big, good, strong hands. Don't they? But the heave and hum of earth movers are precedented by the sound of tectonic plates. “In every part of every [living] thing is stuff that once was rock. In blood, the minerals of the rock.” Just as in fibre-optic cables, toothpaste, bones and iPhones. Nothing is set in stone. Not even stone is set in stone. Nor the laws that were carved into them in the first place.
Enslaved minerals live inside and outside of the body: we have never been solid. Words, like blunt objects, drown out geographic noise—the excavation continues! And just as solidarity requires both solidity and air, so does dropping water make the rock hollow; not by its force, but by constant action.
“A Brief History of Becoming Rock” is a performance and installation that took place at Art Rotterdam in 2018. The work speaks; eats; digests; sculpts; pulverizes; uncovers; inhabits; and rejoices rock. Rock forms the vehicle to not only vocalize, but also demonstrate how facts are fickle and realities contingent. How change is slow but certain, and patient determination a powerful tool.
