Mammal Mammilla Mamma
(2025)
author(s): Lotus Rosalina Hebbing
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023.
BA Photography.
Mammal, a vertebrate animal that was nourished with the milk from the mother when it were young.
Mammilla, nipple of the mammal.
Mamma, where are you.
At the age of twenty, Lotus Rosalina Hebbing had always lived in the city until an unannounced occasion occurred and her parents bought an old farm in the northern part of the Netherlands. There were gargantuan fields embosoming the house. On her visits, Lotus obtained a curiosity for witnessing the growth of crops, but also the demise of the beasts. It couldn’t be coincidental; the amount of times she encountered a dying critter. It fascinated her how she felt identically fallen out of control as the birds that smashed against the windows; an unwillingly lonesome surrender to the external. The carcasses became her comrades and if their bones were to defy the decay, she could find solace in the fecundity of the plains and revive from the objectifications that were pasted onto her by the hum of the city.
A few years later, a collection was made from the occurrences on these acres and contorted to the tale that is bound to fall out of tune. It follows a character known as ‘She’. It has been a long time since She tasted the comfort of her mama’s milk. Attempts of holding onto her childhood were only futile and so She decided to flee to a farm at the end of the world, with the persisting premonition to come near that same milk again. On her expedition to a substitute for alleviation, She encounters sweltering saps, suck stoppers and restless traps. Her observations enjoy fleshly connotations. The head does no longer bother to keep secrets, just like life isn’t hidden on these flatlands.
On her adventures, She invents lullabies that her disappearing mother could have sung to her. There is a suggestion of ambivalence in these songs. Their essence is to lull the awake to distant lands of sleep, but it interprets as a damaged dream. The traces lead back to scapes of sorrow where a melancholic melody alarms what was lost along the way and led to inevitable incompleteness.
A sweet sadness covers the blankets that await. The repeating rocking motion of the lullaby reminds of the tender arms that once were wrapped around her, now forever twisted out of shape.
Fantasized folklore, hysteric nostalgia and shriveled youth meet in the remnants of a music box. The work is making a plea to leave the modern cities, where objectification by surrounding eyes constantly influence the development of the teenage persona, and find consolation in remote lands to discover limitlessly the territories of the self.
ÖR - AS ongoing loop
(2025)
author(s): Aðalheiður Sigursveinsdóttir
published in: Research Catalogue, Iceland University of the Arts
AS this is my final project about my final project at the University of the Arts in Iceland, it serves as a reflection on my own artistic process. AS I am completing my MA in Performing Arts, this moment signifies an ending, yet I feel I am still in the midst of processing it.
AS I set out to create a documentary play rooted in personal experience, aiming to bring realism to the stage. AS I allowed myself throughout the process to repeatedly ask: what am I truly confronting? AS I came to realize that, in the beginning, I was not being honest with myself. AS I tended to lean toward abstraction, to fix things, to escape into dreams rather than meet myself with clarity. AS I was not truthful to my own state of being.
AS a way to hold myself accountable, ÖR ultimately became a kind of encounter, with a meeting within a Program of Honesty. AS if ÖR blends inner and outer realities, flowing in a hybrid form of lived and performed experience.
AS are my initials, it echos in my writings. AS an ongoing loop.
Exercises in Existential Eccentricity. Conceptualising autoimmunity as a variation of the conditio humana
(2023)
author(s): Barbara Macek
published in: University of Applied Arts Vienna
Barb Macek (PhD candidate and fellow (DOC) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Institute of Fine Arts & Media Arts) takes as her starting point self-reflections and her own experiences with the autoimmune disease SLE. She approaches the phenomenon of autoimmunity in relation to fundamental human ambiguity, following the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Macek’s contribution, "Exercises in Existential Eccentricity", explores the bio-philosophical dimension of the disease rather than its bio-medical dimension, showing how autoimmunity raises existential-phenomenological questions regarding bodily ownership, the self, and the notion of the body as “one’s own”. From an assumed embodied diversity, she designs an artistic technique, EEE - Exercises in Existential Eccentricity, drawing on the technique of auto-interviewing, autoethnography and poetics to facilitate a dialogue between different inner voices.