GUT MATTERS

The artistic research of GUT MATTERS focuses on a thematic triad, combining bio-medical perspectives, feminist theory and neolithic archaeological materials with current perspectives onto trauma, disease, mental health and their connections to (physical, social, historical) metabolisms.

This durational, immersive performative sculpture is guided by three non-binary performers which are choreographically and aesthetically entangled, collaborating with a viscid liquid of unique qualities: non-newtonian fluid. Under (too much) pressure it gets stuck and in collaborative soft touch it produces flowing images and movements. The performers make this fluid live, forming ever-changing relations, constellations and images. Moving through landscapes as they create them, boundaries dissolve, insides and outsides become inseparably entangled and the question of scale stays deliberately open, evoking poetic and political questions.

Considering the gut as a material and speculative gateway into the past, present and future, can we access our gut’s metabolisms and comprehensions and look at the excrements of our civilisation together? Can the gut, as a biological conduit, help us access, remember and invent choreographies of connection? What happens in a political environment where conventional ambitions for amelioration or repair lie gutted, where we cannot stomach the status quo anymore? Which relevant forms of relationality can be found via trans-historical choreographies studying neolithic Goddess figures, a fierce erotic fusion of life and death, earth, animal, plant, human and spiritual forces?

(Re-)connection is of course not guaranteed, but it is important to insist that it is available – and it is no exaggeration to say that at this point in Earth’s and humanities' history it is required.