hot spots in a cool place
2025Performance, 30’
Postcard picture point, hot off the press. Double-sided. How beautiful we have it here. Chirping alpine meadows masked by the hum of server racks and digital beeps, some cooling fan winds caress your cheeks. Late at night : up and down, up and down, guard the hollow—a simple exercise in patience. A nation puts its faith in the mountains.
This performance links the belief in the mountains, the Réduit myth and security topos of Switzerland with the profit-driven economy of data storage in old military infrastructure. Using and remembering the visual representations of high-security data centres, the work addresses the ideological promise of the hollowed-out Alps: A place that was built for the storage and preservation of people, food and ammunition now houses the corporate data of multinationals.
Flip a coin long enough, both sides come up tails.
Performed at migma Performance Tage 2025.
06.2-faule_bunker
202311 minutes, fullHD, stereo sound.
06.2-faule_bunker, is a video with findlings and sightings from high altitudes, dispersed like military missiles, and found in the crevices of alpine rock formations. A fragmentary collection of traces, gleaned during a ten-day field research on the hollow Alps, on going underground and on sheltering.
Notes were gathered at IN:DÉPENDANCE Residency from 26.08-04.09.2023.
The IN:DÉPENDANCE is a residency program at 2400 m altitude of Universum Carrousell Journey, Chair of Professor Jan de Vylder at ETH Zürich.
clouds nest like cysts on the soft tissues of their hosting milieu
2022multimedia-installation with videos (7‘, 3.5‘, 3.5‘), sculptures in silicone, fabric and plexiglas, performance and sound.
Your mine-eyes mirror a milieu: a dark site on remote control. A blob of ether, a cloud of confusion, yellow dust sets onto a murky swamp. The granular, hissing, forms a riverbed to flush out data mines’ pixel. Hot spots in a cool place: the datasphere is alive with corporate chunks of imperial extraction. “Dig that bit there, coin!” And in that necrotic foggy zero-energy state, you and I have never been so close.
When to toss the (dry) dust, that once was your thoughts, that turns to swamp that turns to gas? This work is conceptualized as a milieu that hosts human as well as non-human actors, and lands in three main sites: a wormhole-like bunker system, an mining site and a datacenter. The project questions the metaphor of the cloud as a metaphor for the (seemingly) immateriality of the digital, with working through the infrastructures – where the cloud actually touches the ground (as datacenter, render hall, etc.). It dwells around the mystification of notions like the (remote) dark site, the Réduit of Switzerland as a vast bunker-storage space and engages with a datacenter’s geopolitical circumstances that are fueled by thermoculutres and wealth-distribution-inequalities. The performances deal with the relationship we have towards our devices around notions of zero-energy-state, smooth-brain-state and intimacy. In this work I propose to think through the metaphor of the cloud 2.0 as an entangled, yet gaseous being that could unbind thinking from its sharp mind/black-white/computational thought, shifting towards a more entangled, complex thought-world making.
Presented at Centrale Fies, Dro (IT), as part of „tutt(le) rotte - all (the) ways: unfixed“ AEROPONIC ACTS, Dutch Art Institute, July 2022.
With the participation of Alexandra Martens Serrano, Emmeli Person, Izaro Ieregi, Maud Gyssels and Mirjam Steffen. Sound: Maud Gyssels.
bergamot leather scent
2022text performance
The work starts with leather chaps that I’ve found in a vintage store in Brussels. They evoked memories of my grandfather, a blacksmith, and imaginative memories of my grandmother, which I’ve never met, but from whom I’ve inherited my red hair. The text takes this memory as a starting point to think about the lap as a highly connotated and gendered body part, other cavities, such as the Swiss Réduit and talks about hiding, bunkering as Swiss traits.
Performed at Performing Arts Forum, St. Erme, FR, with Dutch Art Institute.
tears to your ears (you do not have)
20225-Channel videoinstallation with smartphones (each around 2‘), beeswax finger.
A text in five chapters shown on five smartphones that are held by beeswax fingers. The text speaks of the intimacy between device and user, the materiality of the digital and the network, that is, with its zoomed-in, up-close videos, a glitchy pixel performance.
Exhibited in Displays of Affection with Eisenbricht, attheoff.space Zürich, in April 2022.
Photos: © Louisa Clever