This space is flanked by two rooms: on the left, guests encounter a “laundry room” with fabric hung in different formations, a clothes line, a drying rack, and a shower; within the “laundry” plays a series of videos showing various everyday interactions with water, recorded in different hemispheres.
Licking Thread, Hearing Everything is a collaborative project with Leonardiansyah Allenda that finds material form after a year of conversations that started with reading Zhuangzi and studying the internal martial art of taijiquan.
It unfolds as a narrative of atmospheres within Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, a UNESCO heritage site that was built as a concrete military fort in the Netherlands before the invention of airplanes. Through sustained collaborative material experimentation in relation to our embodied study of dao principles, Leo and I developed this site-specific spatial narrative while in residence at the Kunstfort. Following the logic of taijiquan, we created a series of spaces that play with qualities of floating, sinking, expanding, contracting, rising, falling.
Entering into a long dark corridor, movement is subtly perceived in the coiled swirls of suspended bamboo threads and the sound of experiments on the guqin, an ancient Chinese stringed instrument.
In the room to the right, an empty space is filled with a video projection showing an ink drawing abstracted by the flowing movements of the camera lens; resonating with these movements is the sound of the guqin echoed from the entrance.
Guests then encounter a room arranged with bright gold matter in a dramatic topography of densities, textures, and shapes.