Weathering: Tidal Spill (day 331)
2019
Isabelle Andriessen with a collaboration from Ida Marie Hede
With the Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology at SixtyEight Art Institute, DK
Weathering: Tidal Spill (day 331) featured artworks by the Dutch artist Isabelle Andriessen and a collaboration with the Danish author Ida Marie Hede. This exhibition and knowledge-making project aimed to engage with questions of human embodiment in times of climate change.
As we stumble through an era of planetary-wide changes, talking about the weather becomes more than simply small talk. The weather affects us: the sun brings out freckles on our noses and cancer in our skin, and regulates our production of Vitamin D. Snow and sleet keep us indoors, directly impacting our social lives and communities. Droughts are putting pressure on the earth’s resources, claiming human and animal lives, while rising water levels provoke migration between continents. Climate change forces us to reconsider the boundaries between humanity and our surrounding habitat, and the weather offers a formula to think through questions of time, space and human subjectivity under siege.
Weathering: Tidal Spill (day 331) presented an exhibition by Isabelle Andriessen, and a discursive programme exploring the body as an interface between human subjectivity and the changing climate, led by Ida Marie Hede and Miriam Wistreich. Andriessen’s time-based sculptures begin to develop from the moment the materials are activated, continuing their process over the course of the exhibition and after. In the exhibition, the sculptures form a grim, speculative landscape in which these zombie materials continue their planned performance. The sculptures contain a chemical solution that is absorbed by the ceramic skin, causing them to develop crystals, grow rash-like fur and simulate symptoms of metabolism and disease. Andriessen questions notions of living and non-living states by animating inanimate materials, working between the fields of chemistry, physics and philosophy. Living both parasitically and in symbiosis, her work offers a glimpse into an infectious and uncanny ecosphere.
As part of the discursive programme, author Ida Marie Hede and curator Miriam Wistreich hosted Weather Writing Workshops, based on methods from écriture feminine, eco feminism and posthuman theory. The workshops invite participants to write their weathered bodies in order to build a more dense understanding of the co-constitutions of human and climactic natures. The workshops aimed to channel the weather through our human bodies and stimulate our meteorological imaginaries and understandings of human-weather interrelations. By asking “Where is the weather? What does the weather remember? What does it forget?” Weathering: Tidal Spill (day 331) formed a speculative investigation into how we can think about relating to the objects and systems around us.
Weathering: Tidal Spill (day 331) was kindly funded by Grosserer L.F. Foghts Fond, Mondriaan Fund, Rådet for Visuel Kunst and the Danish Arts Foundation. A previous edition of Tidal Spill was funded by Lafayette Anticipations. The production of new work for this exhibition was made possible through a residency at the Danish Art Workshops.