Soft Encounters
Textile Sculpture / Installation 2020 - ongoing
The textile sculpture consists of individual, machine- and hand-sewn tentacle-like elements that reform with each installation. Part of it are also splashing sounds and digital animations, which are variably integrated and in a state of permanent development. Fantasies about gentle forms of encounter and coexistence take embodied shape, inviting to dream and gently touch.
What are the dimensions of human thought? Is it possible for humanity to comprehend its own cognitive limits?
And, if that’s the case, what exists beyond the threshold of our understanding? Perhaps dreams, affect and fantasy offer us a path forward into the unknown. As our models of the future suggest the necessity of increasingly fundamental transformations in the present, it becomes urgently clear that we must develop new narratives and forms of coexistence.
These concerns take center stage in the work of Patricia Detmering and Annika Stoll;their exhibition “outside the cave” presents an ecological gestalt that is distinctly feminist in character. Respectively adopting the salamander and octopus as their symbolic familiars, the artists embody their theoretical approaches to develop a dialogue between texts, timelines, and species.
And, if that’s the case, what exists beyond the threshold of our understanding? Perhaps dreams, affect and fantasy offer us a path forward into the unknown. As our models of the future suggest the necessity of increasingly fundamental transformations in the present, it becomes urgently clear that we must develop new narratives and forms of coexistence.
These concerns take center stage in the work of Patricia Detmering and Annika Stoll;their exhibition “outside the cave” presents an ecological gestalt that is distinctly feminist in character. Respectively adopting the salamander and octopus as their symbolic familiars, the artists embody their theoretical approaches to develop a dialogue between texts, timelines, and species.
The octopus, an invertebrate, gelatinous cephalopod, is creative and highly intelligent, capable of dreams, play and learning. Each of its tentacles is able to think and feel independently. It simultaneously encounters and transforms the world through these tentacles; for the octopus, the dialectic between mind and hand, thought and action as experienced by humans doesn’t exist. Perhaps we need to develop ‘tentacles' of our own in order to better confront the fundamentally unstable membrane between self and world, to look more sensitively at our environment and make contact with each other.
Text excerpt: Sandy Becker
Text excerpt: Sandy Becker
