GERRIT RIETVELD ACADEMY JEWELLERY DEPARTMENT GRADUATES

Food is, to me, a precious tool for imagination because of its sensory stimulation: it initiates intimate and complex conversation with your own body. Considering bodies through the spectrum of food culture and food beliefs implies different levels of observation: an intimate scale of our own bodies and a larger societal scale, both allowing questioning the reality of a universal scale.

For my written thesis I looked into liquid nourishment as matter, symbols, beliefs, as historical vessels, as a tool to understand physical and social bodies. I realised that liquid needs to be held but it remains ungraspable.

I chose not to work with liquid but towards its opposite. The ambition here was to figuratively grasp the ungraspable through its literal materiality; to evoke liquid trough its absence.

I worked with food waste as a continuous and unlimited source of material. I collected, dehydrated, grounded and turned everything to powder, exhausting the matter to its utter. I made up a set of rules, gestures and a precise process that smoothly infiltrated my daily routine. Boarders between food habits, artistic practise and research process became porous and turned to membranes. I found myself surrounded by colourful and pungent powders. Powder was the main actor of my graduation work and I needed to stage them. So I built spaces for them.

One is part of the Rietveld building: a vitrine filled with layers of powders as a proof of time accumulating through matter. The other one is a stage: a box from which walls, ceiling and floor are covered with orange powder. The space is mat and dusty, smells like citrus and invites the body to penetrate it through senses.

I feel the need to build and propose new rituals, new ways of consuming and comprehending our food. I feel the need to update the symbols lying in food products and eating habits. Challenging and transcending my own culture is a way to invent new imageries and typologies, and to open possibilities for new intimate and collective imaginations.

For “THE SKIN OF BREATH” project, I have looked into breathing as it is such a meaningful activity which is intimately connected with our body’s reactions as one of the vital signs, and it is always here with us during our lifetime.

In the written research, I have studied about unawareness coming from invisible, hidden, limited sense, and uncared for things. The reason I do not recognise unawareness is that I cannot capture it or make it tangible. This inability hinders my sights and limits the range of my perception.

Imagine.
How can we do capture our breathing?
What if we can see our breathing?
And how does breathing affect our surroundings?

Based on these questions, I attempt to reveal breathing visually. In the uncertain period, the matter of breathing is considered to be significant in our lives. I proposed a new way of observation it.

Driven by the event of finding a chopped living fossil in my neighbourhood “bodies of knowledge” is a strange tea party hosted by non human beings. Participants are invited to have a sensitive dialogue with the smallest and biggest organisms to build kinship and knowledge between unfamiliar bodies.