(Play)

Desire digests what moves it

Maike Hemmers
with Baha Görkem Yalım, Valentina Curandi
Production: Wijkatelier Zuid, Pilar Mata Dupont, Jacco Prantl

Desire digests what moves it is a work consisting of drawings, a video, and a set of cushions. Building on her everyday practice with textile objects, Maike Hemmers made sets of five different small cushions filled with grape seeds and iron bullets. The cushions act as an intermediary to connect bodies that are at a distance. The forms and characteristics of the cushions are based on, and in communication with pastel drawings of affective and vibrating matters that are installed inside the closed-off MAMA showroom. In addition, artists and performers Valentina Curandi and Baha Görkem Yalım engaged with the cushions at home, based on a set of scores that aimed to bring attention to the layered relations between the performing body, the cushions and the domestic. The engagements are playful and intimate, and the interactions with the unconventional cushions re-direct the historical and expected positions our bodies take at home. Recordings of these engagements are brought together as a video on the website of Fictioning Comfort.

More cushions were continuously exchanged in the messenger cycle project that was set up by Tomi Hilsee and WORKNOT!, which spanned over a couple of weeks before the opening of Fictioning Comfort. As a connective space holder in the rounds of the bike messenger, the cushions traveled between friends and people involved in the show.