metropolis m

 ‘I got introduced to it by chance. In my second year at DAI I was part of Banquet X, the COOP study group curated by Bassam El Baroni which dealt with climate change and speculative gastronomy. One of the guest tutors, Jenna Sutela – a Finnish artist, came over to PAF (Performing Arts Forum) in St Erme Outre et Ramecourt, France where we resided for a week. Sutela is working with living organisms and she showed us how to work with this particular living material. For the slime mould to live you need to establish the right climatic conditions, for instance when it comes to temperature and oxygen levels. In this sense those beings are just like us. In PAF it was very cold and humid. Humid is good, because that is what these organisms like, but cold is not. That is why we did not manage to work with slime mould back then.’

‘It is important to note first of all that the organism has a specific life-cycle: it transforms from crusty dormant matter into a plasmodium, which is the slime matter. Its crusty form can be activated to start its life cycle. Sutela offered us some of that crusty matter to bring home, which a fellow student and me were particularly interested in. One of the first things I did after bringing it home was to name it, my partner suggested to call it “Indonesian rice” = Ketan. I took caring for it very seriously and I meticulously followed Sutela’s instructions. I made agar-agar in order to build a “house” for the organism to live in and looked for a suitable environment for it, which ended up to be our smelly basement. Thirty-six hours after I took it down there something happened!’

‘Thirty-six hours after I took ketan down to our basement something happened!’

 ‘Yes, it looked like its tentacles were branching out. I could see it had moved every time I checked in on it. Sutela told us that it likes to eat bacteria, especially when the bacteria from our hands get upon oat-flakes. So I placed some on the agar-agar and the next morning it had multiplied! I was struck because I could see that it was living matter, which made me beyond ecstatic.’

‘Yes! But bringing this sleeping matter back to life I was also faced with an ethical dilemma. I was wondering: What is the caring thing to do now? So I decided to learn how to take care of this organism. I knew from Sutela that vibrant colours and branching out meant it was happily thriving, but the agar-agar environment it was exploring was decaying. This meant that apart from providing new bacteria every day, I had to make new agar-agar once a week to provide an option for Ketan to continue living. The environment it leaves behind turns black, brown, yellow – all the decaying colours. I just felt that I needed to take care of it, back then I did not know why I was so obsessed about it, but now I do.’

‘Yes, care in relation to sharing and connecting. Ketan was a really good research subject in that sense. Ultimately however, it was when I introduced the audience to my project and was able to share the awareness I gained from it, that I knew: this is the reason why I enjoy making work. I always try to minimize the distance between the audience and me as an artist. I am still a minority, you know. As an adoptee of colour it is very important to me that what I share is honest, it has to be personal!’

‘While utilising Ketan, this living and obviously intelligent living matter, for my artistic research, I thought it was important to make sense of what I was doing. In this process, my guiding question was: how can I ethically care for Ketan through learning? With our graduation approaching I knew that my process with Ketan was ending. To celebrate this, I developed a ten-minute Ketan eating ritual addressing the tension between how we humans affect the environment and how we are failing at caringly sustaining it. Very symbolically, our presentations took place in a botanical garden in Italy, which had a beautiful historical Roman cistern. The cistern, where my performance took place, was basically an echo-chamber of my research, filled with green and yellow colours, smelling like fungi – perfect for my work with Ketan!

‘A botanical garden is a space usually created by, and for, high society members. Often, a lot of exotic plant species are brought together for (us) humans to enjoy – extremely problematic! I tried to flip this mechanism around and developed a ritual in which everyone partaking would become a garden for Ketan. To be honest, I was more concerned about what would happen to Ketan’s life-cycle than about what would happen to the humans eating it. Humans anyway continuously choose to do things that harm their health, such as smoking or living in cities such as Rotterdam. As the people of DAI entered the cistern, I handed them petri-dishes with a piece of Ketan saying: “Welcome to Botanic X. Especially for you I made a living compass. It loves the dark, it does not appreciate the light. Please take good care of it.”’ 

‘Based on how Ketan grows I conceptually called it a (dis-)orientation device to caringly disturb our quite goal-oriented way of moving in the domains of society. I find it fascinating that slime mould has about 700 type of sexes, and Physarum polycephalum is just one of many formless growing masses  able to merge, divide and merge again. Apart from that, the scientists still don’t know what kind of species or taxonomic group it belongs to, so they have not been able to classify it in detail!’

‘I always try to minimize the distance between the audience and me as an artist’

‘Yes, and I think my performance at Daily Practice, is a good example for that. In the space, pieces of fabric are hanging from the ceiling. One by one I put them onto my body, gradually moving from yellow to brown. From being Ketan (yellow), I passed through all other kinds of colours until arriving at my own. I think those eight months with Ketan will always be influencing my process, just as much as the writings by Octavia Butler and other black sci-fi. Already decades ago they created these non-human life forces in their stories, in order for them to critically enter into the worldly political affairs.’

‘Totally! We constantly talked about joy in our theory group at DAI. However marginalized you are in the eyes of society, in terms of “success” or “poverty” for example, nobody can take away your urgent desire for joy and celebratory feelings. That idea pretty much forms the core of my research, and is actually also extremely important in Black philosophy. For me, growing up, I do not specifically recall my white environment as joyful. I think my current partner was the first one to show me joy in myself. Having a Dutch East Indies colonial background, she knows mixed backgrounds and what it means to live in different worlds simultaneously. She recognized that in me before I even did so myself, because before, I had never even seen myself as non-white.’

‘For me, both as an artist and as a person, it is really important to try not to other and not to value, which obviously is impossible. Of course I mess up, all the time, but I am trying!’

‘Yes, it made me allow joy and accept making mistakes as part of the process of being an artist but also being a human. The other side of being adopted from Colombia to the Netherlands is that I am seen as super privileged. This simultaneous way of existing ­plays an important part in my practice. That is why I put on all the different colours in the performance; to express that I am containing all of them, along with all their complexities.’

‘I am also a huge fan of Denise Ferreira da Silva. She wrote an article on difference without separability and that text[2] really is fundamental for me! How do we even perceive difference? Ferreira Da Silva writes that it is the process of “othering” that creates distance, and that this is where the problem arises. Othering causes devaluation and disqualification, and everything else comes out of that. For me, both as an artist and as a person, it is really important to try not to other and not to value, which obviously is impossible. Of course I mess up, all the time, but I am trying!’

‘Yes, I really am jumping head first into things, trusting that if my actions are motivated by love and urgency, the work will come together eventually. I mean, nothing develops in clear straight lines, just take a look at my art career –which I do not even consider a career yet. Everything moves in weird movements, trying to find its own way. This is how I perceive any kind of relationship and definitely also my artistic process. This is life! It is not a profession, it is just the way it is and I cannot do it differently. So now, after the DAI, the only responsibility I have is to engage with it intentionally, like I do in my performances;  really being there, making contact and honestly sharing my story with the audience.’

‘During the presentation of another work of mine to (dis)appear ~ the performance of everyday life I was guiding people through the space with my voice, inviting them to follow me. The movement became a way of narrating, both for me and for the audience. This way of moving together with the audience was crucial for my practice then and still is now; I am still very interested in how I can move together with the audience. In Daily Practice, however I want to tell a different story during which I interact with the audience in subtle ways. This story is based on my personal displacement as an adoptee of colour in relation to my experience with Ketan. I am still thinking about the direction I’d like to take with my next projects and audiences. In any case, I think my works will always include a search for ways to interact.’

‘What I am doing at Daily Practice is indeed very minimal, but very crucial. The eating-ritual at DAI was very clearly an open invitation. That way of inviting is something that I think I will always want to continue to explore; I need it for the work to become present! I noticed that physically enacting my own narratives makes them easier to remember. This performative act has a meaning. Only afterwards can I attach words to it, again as with the Ketan process. Now that I am combining movement, gestures and language, as reciting text passages I have written, in my performances, I can imagine that the element of language will become less and less important. It might become more and more about moving together with the audience, about presenting open invitations. Because my interest lies in that question of how bodies move and interact.’

‘I am working on that. During the opening performance at Daily Practice, polaroids were made. To me, this is a direct way of accessing an event at which you were not present. One thing I also find important is that after I wore the textiles during the performance, they  have gotten a different shape. That is an important detail, also for every new project. I want to think that through more: How can I fill the space with the ephemeral energy of the passed event? It is exciting to me to see how that energy holds the space together; how the light falls into the space, how the day unfolds, and so on. It is such a sensorial thing.’

‘Yes, exactly, because to me it does not make sense that there is this beautiful space with this beautiful sun and nobody sees it. And for this particular show it is quite relevant, because there is also a photograph of me with a beam of sun entering my new studio. When the sun shines on the textile works it reveals things; it reveals how full of emptiness they are. As I was hinting at during the performance: “What stays hidden and what gets exposed in the light.”’