Before proceeding this website, please take a few seconds and try to think of a moment you had with someone that felt awkward or intimidating, but at the same time soothing and comforting. This moment can involve a stranger, a friend, a lover, a family member, maybe even your pet, or just yourself. Try to relive that moment and the feeling you experienced. Try to think about the bittersweet tension created by a sudden emotional or physical intimacy. To give an example..I feel it every time I hug my parents. Got it?
Great, now we can continue..
On this website I will try to guide you through my ongoing research dealing with intimate tension. You can see what incidents led me to new experiments and how different themes emerged from daily life, coincidences and artistic inspirations. My goal is to collect these moments to explore different layers required to create environments that trigger those ambivalent, complex and beautiful emotions that mirror our fears, desires, society and its norms.
On the surface, the bed appears to be just a piece of furniture that serves one purpose, which is to give us a place to rest and sleep.
If we look beyond the surface, it is so much more than just a place to rest. It can tell us a lot about the owner and their circumstances.Unmade or made? Double or single? In a way, it is the most contradictory piece of furniture we have. It can be a place for relaxation, but also a place of restlessness and insomnia. It can be a place of pleasure, but also a place of trauma. Sitting on a stranger's bed, can create tremendous tension. The bed is filled with so many meanings and connotations that an unbiased encounter with it is almost impossible. If the sense of touch is the most intimate sense, the bed is the most intimate piece of furniture.
During a presentation I filled a room with noisy bubble wrap and silent sheets.
I sat in a rocking chair in my pajamas and read a letter to myself. The audience had to sit very close together on the floor, the bubble wrap caused little - pop - here and there.The air was filled with uncomfortable comfort. One comment stuck in my mind:
If we think of intimacy, the word stranger doesn't necessarily come up. Intimacy requires a certain amount of trust and comfort that we usually don't have with strangers.
This is precisely the contrast that makes those moments so intense, because we don't expect them. It's the endless possibilities that have the potential to collapse in a matter of seconds. It can become a forgotten memory, but it can also change something within your life. It can make things easier, because there is freedom from obligation and expectations. You can stop, walk away and get on with your life.
I saw a connection between the satisfying quality of bubble wrap and the tension that arises when strangers sit close together or when people are forced to remain silent. The closer they get, the more bubbles burst, keeping the suspense up.
bubble wrap = tension creator
Have you ever wondered how many people have slept in your bed when staying in a hotel? Have you ever wondered how many stories were told in these sheets, how many tears were shed, and how many babies were made? Have you felt uncomfortable after thinking about it?
Did you ever feel someone else`s presence?
This experiment includes two steps. First, spectators had to go one-on-one in an almost empty room. All they could see was a sheet lying on the floor, a beamer, a webcam and a live projection of the sheet from an angle above. The spectators realised that once they lay on the sheets, they could see their bodies, projected in front of them from an odd angle. The spectators were left in the room with nothing but themselves.
In the second step, the spectators had to go back into the room.
Instead of a blank projection, there was a pre-recorded video of me lying in the same position and on the same blanket as the spectator before. The spectators had to reorient themselves on the sheets and were now confronted with my presence and the sound of a human breathing filling the room. After a while, my pre-recorded self turned its head and stared directly into the webcam, towards the spectator.
The idea for My Bed was inspired by a sexual yet depressive phase in the artist's life when she had remained in bed for four days without eating or drinking anything but alcohol.When she looked at the vile, repulsive mess that had accumulated in her room, she suddenly realised what she had created. Emin ardently defended My Bed against critics who treated it as a farce and claimed that anyone could exhibit an unmade bed. To these claims the artist retorted, Well they didn`t, did they?" No one had ever done that before."
Needless to say, secrets are something intimate and personal. We try to hide something from others that might make us vulnerable. In many films, the space under the bed seems to be a perfect place to hide them. We think it's a safe space, where nobody would dare to look.
During one of my presentations, spectators had to write a secret on a post-it and then tape it under a bed that I was pretending to sleep on. One by one, the spectators had to enter the room and make a confession, with me being present. Only a 2cm thick piece of wood was separating my body from the secret below me. The most interesting part actually started after the presentation. Some spectators seemed genuinely upset that I was asking for something as personal as a secret without permission. I realised that asking strangers such a thing can get people very upset. A secret should stay a secret, right? Who am I to ask for such a thing? That brought me to the question:
It all started with a bloody incident at the metal workspace...
While I got bandaged by a stranger, I noticed the tense atmosphere when he touched my hand and took care of me. I sensed that he felt intimidated by this sudden intimacy, and so did I.
I started using webcams as a tool for my experiment, because I see them as a medium that ceates a certain discomfort about one's presence. Many times we feel exposed and uncomfortable when we see our face projected onto a large wall. Usually we use webcams in a safe space where we can decide what others can see. I like to play with that moment of intimate exposure.
Let me tell you about R. I call him R in order ro protect his identity. R is a middle-aged man, slowly getting bald. He comes to the bar I am working at almost every day, alone. Sometimes he meets up with other 'R's'. It can be said, that R is not happy. The more R drinks, the sadder gets and the more he complains about his failures in love and life in general. Sometimes he cries. An average person cries around 80 liters in their life. This got me thinking about how easily R would fill those liters with the beer he drinks. R, I hope you will never read this.
Or maybe you should.
Sidenote: This is not necessarily about R, although his name came up 8 times. R is just a symbol of an unhealthy search for intimacy.
In an installation, reminiscent of a hotel, each audience member will get their own bedroom. Here they are alone and anonymous, until they learn about the visitors in the other rooms. In its original set up the work functioned as a model for the anonymity associated with city life, where people simultaneously live similar lives. Due to the social implications caused by the current pandemic, the work will now also be a reflection on our time in self isolation, a time in which the proximity of strangers suddenly became a threat.
A quick experiment that questions the potential of possibile realities. It contains my used sheets with a video projection from an abandoned bedroom I visited in Cyprus last year.
Just the word being touched refers to something beyond the superficial. The sense of touch is the first sense we develop in the womb and calls up intensely embodied emotional memories. It is the most intimate and, at the same time, the most underrated sense we have. We have art for the eyes, music for the ears, food for the taste, but we don't train our hands to touch.
We can see without being seen, but can we touch without being touched?
According to urbandictionary.com Pillow Talk has two connotations:
The first connotation is the most thought of one. It's intimate talk with your romantic partner in bed, either before or after sex (but usually after). It is usually at this moment where all personal thoughts, desires and troubles are revealed in a candit one. Those thoughts you've locked away during daytime are now front and center, completely transparent to your partner. Pillow talk can really be anything, it can be goofy or serious, but the main distinction is that everything spoken is 100% candid and true to themselves. No pretense, just you being you.
The second connotation is less restrictive and applies more generally. Here, Pillow Talk is referring to the intimate deep conversations between two or more people within a platonic relationship (e.g. friend, colleague). It often takes place in a location that stimulates bonding and conversation. For example, a literal sleepover with your friends can spur pillow talk, or a night out at a pub with your bros. Again, same meaning applies here. The conversations are usually very candid and lasts for hours, no pretense whatsoever.
https://magazine.artland.com/subtracting-reality-revealing-beauty-tribute-christo-jeanne-claude-legacy/
"They began with wrapping objects, small everyday items such as bottles and cans packed in fabric or synthetic materials and twine. The idea behind the wrapping was that the concealment encourages the viewer to look with renewed curiosity to the object beneath and the space in which it exists, whilst also adding new sculptural qualities to ordinary shapes."
I had the strange idea of giving R a hankerchief with his embroidered receipts on top the next time he's drunk and crying.
So I went to the embroidery machine..
I was always drawn to tactility. This went so far that I invented a haptic Thursday on which two friends and I had to wear something that had an intriguing tactility every Thursday. The haptic Thursdays didn’t last long, but so did my love for tacitly and haptics.
Very often we are scared to touch something, because museums, society or bacteria tell us so. But the human desire and curiosity to touch is natural. The haptic eye wants to touch, but the mind is unsure. A tactile encounter with art affords a much more intimate experience. It creates a physical bond between the artwork and the perceiver. This contradiction of longing and detachment is also present when we experience intimate tension.
I saw a parralell between the shared secrets and the receipts of R. Both are things we want to hide. We want to hide our secrets from the world as much as we would like to hide the trace of our drinking habits. Now I'm the owner of those proofs. I call them receits of vulnerbility. So what to do with them? By embroidering those documents, I made those things poeple normally would like to hide permanent. If we look back to the embroidery history, it used to be an ancient craft that first had a practical purpose of repairing clothing. I know that embroidering something we would rather like to hide will not repair this issue, but I think the first step to get rid of something that makes us vulenerbale and uncomftable, is to make it visible and not to hide it. Own it.
I remember being at a party at someone's house a few months ago and the bedroom was crowded with people, squashed together. The only free place was the bed. Nobody dared to sit on it. It was as if the bed was protected with barbed wire. It's inappropriate, right? It can be even worse when you have to sit on a bed with another person. Can you imagine having lunch with your boss in a bed? Even on a first date, you tend to avoid the bed in the beginning, instead you choose to sit on an uncomftable chair.
In this experiement, I wanted to create that awkward feeling of sharing a bed with a stranger. The spectators were asked to lie down on some sheets with someone. As soon as their bodies touched the blanket, a touch sensor hiddden under the sheets turned on and activated the webcams and sound. Suddenly, the spectators saw their live projections on the wall while "Careless Whispers" played.
In Faces the audience watches the performance not from seats but from beds: not with those with whom they came to the theatre, but with total strangers. The actors move between the beds. Van Hove: 'We wanted to confront the audience with the uncomfortable situation of infidelity. By taking the viewers out of their comfort zone, we stimulate a more active looking. When they leave at the end, none of them have had the same experience: just like the two lead characters in the film.'
This was a very spontanous experiment I did to see how much touch can stimulate our imagination.
It started with a piece of fabric that I hardened with textile glue. The resulting structure with it's convex and concave shapes reminded me of dunes. I decided to play with that imagination and projected a video of a dune landscape while the specator had to put their hands in a covered box that contained the hardened fabric. While watching the video, the specator touched the unfamiliar piece.
Using the same principle, I placed another piece of fabric, this time a piece of mattress protecor, under the box. The thin wavy curves reminded me of the wadden sea, so this time the spectaor saw a video of the wadden sea while touching the piece of fabric.
(...) in 1947, Duchamp created a three-dimensional rubber breast on a black velvet background. He calls this piece Prière de toucher or Please touch. It was dedicated to Duchamp’s lover Maria Martins. This piece was designed to be the cover for a luxurious edition of the catalog called Le Surréalisme en 1947. The catalog was to accompany the exhibition Exposition Internationale du Surréalism. In contrast to most art, touching this work, is not only allowed, but encouraged.
After speaking to the spectators, they told me that they felt disoriented because of the mixed realities. They started mirroring each other to feel safe. Touching each other let them feel more secure and less lost as they explored the space together. They were looking together for safety in a lost place.
Intimacy can also be a search for security.
I started experimenting with biomaterial because those flesh-like, fragile structures remind me of the human body . In a way, we are also biomaterials.
I like the disgust some people have when they see those slimy, slippery structures. It reminds me of the disgust people tend to have with body liquids, although it's natural and a part of us. I have this image in mind of me covering a nude dancer with biomaterials and letting her/him move. For now, it's just an arm moving around with a big piece of starch, agar and glycerine.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You made it this far. Now you will be rewarded with a secret page.
Remember when I first asked you about an awkward intimate moment?
If you want to share it anonymously, you can share it here.
In its Sudan part this table has spongy material, sandpaper, wool, pig’s bristle and wire bristle. (Crude, greasy, rough, sharp, burning tactile values, that evoke African visions in the mind of the toucher). In the sea part (middle), the table has different grades of emery paper. (Slippery, metallic, cool, elastic, marine tactile values). In the Paris part (bottom), the table has silk, watered silk, velvet and large and small feathers. (Soft, very delicate, warm and cool at once, artificial, civilized).
(Marinetti 1921)
The rough and poor materials at the top can be interpreted as colonialist stereotypes. Where Sudan is crude, Paris is supposedly civilized. However, it is important here to judge the tactile values not just from a linguistic, but also from a sensual point of view. When perceiving a surface with a haptic gaze and linguistically labeling it as rough, it will prime viewers, for it has a negative connotation.
Corona has changed our realationship to touch immensely. In times when physical contact is forbidden and distance is required, touch becomes a luxury good. I often saw people kissing with their masks on. Instead of the sound of a kiss, there was only a dull sound. Is a kiss still a kiss when there is no human flesh involved?
During a touch sensor workshop, we were asked to create an interaction between two people, where a touch sensor triggers something. I decided to make a corona-proof kissing method by wrapping conductive aluminum foil around two face masks and connecting them to a touch sensor. As soon as the two masks touched, a kissing sound appeared. The webcam showed an intimate close-up projected behind the two kissing people. Using a mannequin instead of a real human made the whole situation even more surreal and absurd.
