Welcome to the exhibition The Leaky Bodies Archives - articulating bodily interventions.
On this page, you can find the work of students of iArts (Academy of Arts Maastricht), made in the context of a workshop provided by research centre What Art Knows and BLOB collecture, during Dutch Design Week 2025. These works were made in 30 minutes, in quick artistic research in which concept, politics, intervention and documentation feed each other.
Our workshop with second year iArts students consisted of different parts:
- An introduction to the Leaky Bodies Archives, in which we share our conceptual and philosophical background and our politics and ethics. During this workshop, we want to pay particular attention to how all of these feed into our making process and the bodily intervention that we make in this project.
- Tea-tasting, which we practice to demonstrate a documentation process in which bodily experiences and finding language for bodily experiences are mutually reinforcing.
- The Leaky Bodies Archives: participants articulate and document experiences of leakiness and porosity.
- In groups, students make their own artistic research, going through the following steps:
- What change would you like to see in the world? What are your politics / ethics?
- What kind of bodies does this planet need in order to achieve this?
- Create an in situ intervention that allows you to foster, observe and document such bodies.
- Create an archive in which you can articulate, organise, and share your documentations.
- Reflect on what you have learned in the process of making this archive of bodily experiences.
- Exhibition of students’ work and reflection/discussion.
Group 4 created alternative labels for food packaging. Aiming to create awareness about meat consumption, they articulated detailed contextualisation: what is at stake when eating meat? What and who is involved in the production of this food and what do we incorporate while eating it? What would change if we are more aware of everything that is attached to what we consume and how can packaging play a role in this?
Group 2 worked with different materials to articulate words for bodies they seek to cultivate. What stood out most for them, was how their presence while observing and documenting, created its own intervention as the person selling French fries sought to make a deal with them: a portion of fries in exchange for a cigarette. This was illustrative for how observation and documentation are performative and intervening in and on themselves.
Group 3 collaged a multi-species body with material found both in our collection of archival objects and in nature. Their collage fostered a discussion about how the combination of different materials – such as medical bandages and trees – invites viewers to question the human body and anthropocentric thinking. In the end, or so they argue, every “body” consists of similar material, which makes singling out any kind of body from others arbitrary.
Group 1 started with an intervention that produces bodies with a “grote bek”: a quality that according to them is language specific and could be cultivated more, at least in certain contexts. They set out to interview people about experiences of having a “grote bek” or to be “the devil’s advocate” and to observe their bodies while talking about this. Priming themselves with this focus, they ended up in a situation in which they interviewed two first aid workers, who were called to action because somebody cut their finger. The group witnessed their body changing as they shifted to professional action mode. As they went out into the field with anatomical paper charts, they were cued to particularly focus on the neuro-muscular bodies of these workers, as they “dropped” their arms and shoulders, as though dropping everything to be ready for action.