OBSCURING THE RIETVELD
live performance w/ Albert Mayr
Pooping Back And Forth Forever...
Gerrit Rietveld Pavillion, 2018
Massaging the Rietveld was a performance consisting of smearing vaseline and squid ink on the square meter glass panel of the entrance of the Rietveld Pavillion, happening simultaneously to Albert Mayr’s live electroacoustic sound act within one of the Rietveld Academy’s trash containers.
The Rietveld Pavillion – also referred to as the Glass Pavilion – is a student-run project space and exhibition venue for the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and realized posthumously in 1966. Trained within the De Stijl movement and the values of International Modernism, Rietveld venerated glass not only as a material but also as a philosophical tool able to democratize visibility, enforce hygiene and eradicate bourgeois secrecy and class stratification. In the Netherlands in particular, the prevalence of glass architecture and transparency drew roots from calvinist, Protestant ethics : an upright citizen has nothing to hide behind closed doors.
Tuning into the materiality and genealogy of glass, born in coasts and made out of silica found in sand, the materials used all share the same provenance : squid ink, a visceral excretion of mucus and melanin and petroleum jelly from accumulated, stratified aquatic organism remains. Smeared onto the glass sheet, they spread an intense marine scent, allowing to work directly with olfactory memory centers as a means of transport towards the materials’ birthplace.
As a defense mechanism, melanin and mucus disfigure the glass sheet and buildings’ entrance in order to question the myth of the transparent, modern subject and universal citizen moving frictionlessly through the world. Weaponizing opacity and treating the window like a screen, marks and finger prints are spread widely and losely in a frantic movement, punctuating the recurring loop of Mayr’s soundscape. As spectral counterparts, two glass sand cast feet stand immobilized on the floor of the Pavilions’ grid, pointing towards a subject constantly monitored, measured and immobilized at coastal checkpoints, with necropolitics and the grid deciding its right to visibility and movement : who moves and who turns into a ghost.
Photo & video credits : Mirre Yayla Seur, Liesl Roos, Marie de Bruyn
OBSCURING THE RIETVELD live performance w/ Albert Mayr
"Pooping Back And Forth Forever...", Gerrit Rietveld Pavillion, 2018
Massaging the Rietveld was a performance consisting of smearing vaseline and squid ink on the square meter glass panel of the entrance of the Rietveld Pavillion, happening simultaneously to Albert Mayr’s live electroacoustic sound act within one of the Rietveld Academy’s trash containers.
The Rietveld Pavillion – also referred to as the Glass Pavilion – is a student-run project space and exhibition venue for the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, designed by Gerrit Rietveld and realized posthumously in 1966. Trained within the De Stijl movement and the values of International Modernism, Rietveld venerated glass not only as a material but also as a philosophical tool able to democratize visibility, enforce hygiene and eradicate bourgeois secrecy and class stratification. In the Netherlands in particular, the prevalence of glass architecture and transparency drew roots from calvinist, Protestant ethics : an upright citizen has nothing to hide behind closed doors.
Tuning into the materiality and genealogy of glass, born in coasts and made out of silica found in sand, the materials used all share the same provenance : squid ink, a visceral excretion of mucus and melanin and petroleum jelly from accumulated, stratified aquatic organism remains. Smeared onto the glass sheet, they spread an intense marine scent, allowing to work directly with olfactory memory centers as a means of transport towards the materials’ birthplace.
As a defense mechanism, melanin and mucus disfigure the glass sheet and buildings’ entrance in order to question the myth of the transparent, modern subject and universal citizen moving frictionlessly through the world. Weaponizing opacity and treating the window like a screen, marks and finger prints are spread widely and losely in a frantic movement, punctuating the recurring loop of Mayr’s soundscape. As spectral counterparts, two glass sand cast feet stand immobilized on the floor of the Pavilions’ grid, pointing towards a subject constantly monitored, measured and immobilized at coastal checkpoints, with necropolitics and the grid deciding its right to visibility and movement : who moves and who turns into a ghost.
Photo, video credits & thanks to : Mirre Yayla Seur, Liesl Roos, Marie de Bruyn