projects ︎
Home is Where the Heart is (a collective recipe)
An object slowly floating lands in the palm of my hands, merging with the how that has been given to me in a continuous cycle of valuable exchange. As we cook, we remember the kinship we form through thinking together, otherwise – constructing a world in which communities are not seen as labels. Let this polyphony of scents invite you to experience the imaginative possibilities of a simple exchange of recipes.
‘Home is Where the Heart’ is has connected 10 individuals into a collective being which attended the first gathering of my ongoing project ‘The Kinship Cookbook’, called Home Sweet Home. Through reading and writing together, following a performance from one of the participants, creating an ephemeral in-situ installation with personal offerings and a collective dinner, we set off to rethink the domestic as a transformative space of diverse values. Through these collective moments, the participants wrote recipes which later on I activate through performance, sculptural interventions and installation – accentuating the necessity of embracing our queer kinships and exploring diverse embodiments of human and non-human nature.
Costume
Aidan Abnet
Animation
Sjoerd Beijers
Camera & Edit
Isaac Ponseele
Benjamin Ponseele
Music
Benjamin Schoones
Typography
Seppe-Hazel Laereman
The Kinship Cookbook (ongoing)
What if we could use language in a way that would escape the predicament of being a functional instrument? What if our stories could invite the lichen, butterflies, bacteria, and fungi to teach us how to grief, love and grow? How does our forming of kin influence our collective responsibility?
‘The Kinship Cookbook’ is a proposition to gather, speculate, and share knowledge around the forming of inclusive infrastructures using recipes as a methodology. The process of assembly, based on gatherings revolving around different topics is essential in the collective manifest which the cookbook accumulates through time. Set to challenge traditional societal norms, it provides an alternative rooted in world building and speculation, and ultimately builds a new ground for collective reflection.
Using the emergent kinships as a prototype for the visualisation of the content of the recipes, the installation invites the audience to enter a possible world in which care and kindness is embedded in the formulation of these elements, and therefore forms a living, growing work.
Master project at KASK & Conservatorium, Ghent
Photography credits go to Johan Poezevara
celestial furnace: sentient vessels
This collection is a material study into the food container as a versatile object, which in its peculiarity offers new way of looking at serving and overall use. The objects, whose colors are deeply inspired by shapes and textures in nature, celebrate the equilibrium between human and non-human — opening a portal for envisioning new narratives for emerging rituals.
Transcendental Sympathy
‘Transcendental Sympathy’ is an exploration of space through exploring each other. A celebration of abundance, change and nature. We open our arms to embrace new narratives, which we carve together in unity with the Earth. Through inevitable change, for every species on the planet, how do we create a new grounds for coexistence?
Nurturing curiosity, being in touch with our surrounding and ourselves, repairing old ways and providing room for mutual bloom, working together to construct new ways of exploring kindness, repair and intimacy, the performers find themselves creating new rituals with which they establish connection to nature, the divine and amongst themselves.
Performed by
Igor Herder
Katharina Busl
Lakisha Apostel
Sofía Murillo Lommers
Bachelor project at HKU, Utrecht
(X)ARCADIA
What if there are practices of care that transcend our pre-conceived notions of it? What does it entail to live in a Queertopia? Where the placement, smell, texture, volume and meaning can form complete hybrids and co-exist in a limitless rotation? For ‘(X)ARCADIA’, I asked myself if that is possible to make tangible in the cyber sphere, morphing and colliding elements to conjure my own personal utopia.