Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?

Tuesday 24 April 2018, 19:00-22:00 hrs
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
RSVP: reserveren@stroom.nl
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Language spoken: English
Performances and screenings
With: Marjanne Helvert & Pauline Agustoni, Rowan Wigley, Vectors, rkss & Swan Meat
The evening will be recorded and broadcast through Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee radio

Part of De Dingen (16 - 26 April 2018 at Stroom Den Haag).
>> Download exhibition guide (English only)

Your body is an organised pile of muscles and bones, your body is a citizen, your body is a protestor, your body is a place of violent acts, of loving acts, your body is online, measured, analysed, felt, technological, a partly nonhuman body. Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?, a quote taken from Donna Haraway's 1990 Cyborg Manifesto, proposes to extend our categorisation of things by imploding our bodies. It features performances and screenings which look to specific objects and object histories to challenge ideas on sustainability, beauty, (trans)femininity, the natural, and the categorisation of the human.

Marjanne Helvert & Pauline Agustoni
Once Created, Never Destroyed
Could there be such a thing as material rights? As humans, animals, and some natural entities are in the process of gaining legal rights, should human-made objects be granted rights as well? We might grant rights to the forest and the tree, but when we decide to build a chair out of that tree, we need to extend those same rights to that chair. Once Created, Never Destroyed proposes a responsibility for all things once created; for to waste an object is to destroy ourselves.

Rowan Wigley
Heresy of Champna (2016)
This surreal satire of a typical shampoo advert aims to reveal controversies within the beauty industry by using absurd analogies and metaphors that influence the characters, film design and visual symbolism within the imagined world of Heresy of Champna.
www.rowanwigley.com

Vectors
Contact Zones
An audiovisual performative design piece divided into 3 parts, where humans, non-human-made nature, and technology communicate with each other. Artificial intelligence counts with a different time than the climate, capital, the Moon, a road-bump, a starfish, a rock, slime pod, squid, atomic weapons, bacteria, genomes, carbon, and homo sapiens.

rkss & Swan Meat
Queer Plastic
A synthetic and intimate object, the Barbie Doll, as a starting point to explore the interlocked polymers of immaterial and material agents. Barbie, made from oil from Saudi Arabia, embodies a kind of toxic cis femininity and oil. rkss and Swan Meat look for new worlds out of this swath of plastic polymers.

MORE ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Marjanne Helvert & Pauline Agustoni
Marjanne van Helvert is a designer, writer, and educator. She received an MA in Cultural Studies from the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen (2007) and a BDes in Textile Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie Amsterdam (2013). She explores the dynamics between theory and practice of design, within the realms of design ethics and aesthetics, DIY practices, gender politics, utopia and dystopia. Other projects include the manifesto Dirty Design (2013), the Dirty Clothes collection (ongoing), and the book The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future (2016, Valiz Publishers).

Pauline Agustoni is a practitioner from La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, whose field of action involves conceptual, material, object, textile and spatial design. Her approach stimulates her to freely explore the theoretical and practical sides of design, merging hands-on work with research and theory. Interested in the influence of products and materials on our daily lives, she aims to develop alternatives in how we produce and consume goods.


Rowan Wigley
Rowan Wigley is an independent filmmaker and freelance art director working in London. Rowan's work predominantly focuses on transcending imagined and real perceptions of the world that we live in. Rowan is a Booth girl as well as an alumni of Stopplayrecord, ICA London. She has exhibited at Peckham Platform, Goldsmiths University, The ICA, Newlyn Art Gallery, Stow Film Lounge, Vauxhall Cinema, Modern Art Oxford, Space Hackney, Arnolfini Gallery, HOME, and many more.

Vectors
Vectors - formed by Lucie de Bréchard, Sascha Krischock, and Tereza Ruller- is a materialized group of alter egos investigating the possibilities of defending non-humans by the use of cotton fabrication, muscle contractions and tools made in the recent century all shoveled up on the muddy grounds of the human-made stage.

rkss
rkss is an alias of Robin Buckley, a London based sound artist who works around the politics and aesthetics of club culture, technology and queerness. Their releases on UIQ, Where To Now?, Alien Jams work with the materiality of film sound, YouTube and EDM sample packs. Buckley runs a radio series for Resonance Extra called Lossless Communication, exploring sound discovery in the internet era. They have recently presented work at 3hd Festival, Fluid Festival and at OHM in Berlin, as well as performed at Cafe Oto, Sound Acts, ICA, Sisters NYC, Rye Wax, The Brunswick Club, Foodhall, ACUD MACHT NEU and The Waiting Room.

Swan Meat
Swan Meat is a producer, writer and games enthusiast from Washington, DC who is currently based in Cologne, Germany, where she composes ‘carnivalesque assemblages of spoken word & noise' (Noisey) that find ‘a seamless crossover between literature & music' (Tiny Mix Tapes). She is a prolific producer, frequently releasing solo and collaborative projects, such as Knife Splits Ice, an EP released last summer with Japanese avant-garde producer Yoshitaka Hikawa.


photo: design: The Rodina
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
'Rowan Wigley, 'Heresy of Champna'
Vectors, 'Contact Zone'
photo: courtesy the artists
De Dingen
photo: design: The Rodina