PBS For The Arts

We want to come into a space and start to feel part of the space.

Instead of putting people within the digital world, we want to pull them out and bring them back into the real world and make them understand the value of the world we live in.

So Drift is a collaboration between Lonneke and myself.

We work on the relationship between nature and technology.

We create our own technologies to immerse our audiences in sculptures that reconnect us back to our natural environments.

The first work is called Fragile Future, where you see real dandelions and they are connected to electrical circuits and it shows a connection between nature and technology where the two help each other instead of fight each other.

Then you see like hundreds of flying lights.

The lights are going in a very natural movement through the space.

And it's based on the movement of elm seeds that we see in the in the fall running through Amsterdam.

Ego is a massive woven block, and this block is a symbol of the human mind.

And the human mind is very control freak, I would say.

That's why we made it into a square and then it starts to shapeshift.

So the rigid block can become completely fluid.

It can fall on the ground.

It can stretch out.

For us, the block is the symbol of the human construct, and we believe that a human construct needs to adapt and change.

With this work, we also want to focus attention on how we have built the world around us.

We have chosen, of all materials in this world, concrete to live in.

We have created structures that are rigid.

And I think there is a reason that we don't really respond to climate change.

We built environments that are still and we don't have to react to and we want to show how it feels like if your environment is changing.

When people start laying underneath a piece and the blocks are coming down for the first time, they might think it's suspended because you can't look beyond them.

But a certain point when they're when they're completely down, they start turning over axles that would be impossible, when they would be suspended from from the roof.

And that's when they open their minds.

You know, that's the moment that we can plant the seed and people start thinking, What are you trying to tell me?

Camille Norment: Plexus is a two part sculptural sound installation.

When the viewer enters the space, they encounter a large brass bell and as you walk in, your body, whether you realize it or not, it's sort of modulating sort of the sound that you're hearing.

And as one gets closer to this bell, that can begin to hear sort of these artifact tones that were actually taken from public broadcasts of protests around sort of environmental and political struggles from the sixties and seventies.

So that's sort of layered and embedded within the piece itself.

And that's something that Camille Norment, the artist, is very interested in.

She's thinking about, you know, our relationship to historical sort of issues as well.

You know, this idea of the radio static and, you know, environmental political struggles in the sixties and seventies into the present.

And this idea of, you know, the history always being present.

And as we enter the second gallery, we sort of go from the minimal to, in a way, something far more diffuse.

There's this big vaulted ceiling that in many ways sort of almost resembles a capsized ship or sort of the ribbed frame of a ship.

And in this space, she's really been thinking about the history of the site, these maritime histories, these sort of histories of industrialization, of labor, of migration, forced and otherwise.

And that sort of created sort of the ecological reality and crisis that we're currently living in.

And so what she decided to do is work with a chorus of 12 vocalists to actually emulate the sounds that she sort of specified from the space.

Viewers are really invited to sit down on the wood structures that come out almost like structural limbs.

And what you feel is the sounds of each of these tones coming through the human body by way of these wooden structures into your own body.

And you feel this vibrational connection.

There are opportunities for thinking about the way in which we listen collectively in this space, you know, the way in which we begin to affect other people's experiences when we move through the world.

That I think can motivate people in various ways to sort of leave the gallery and think differently about the world we live in.

Carrie Mae Weems work certainly comes to us on a scale with an immersion, with a power that probably you've never seen before or experienced before.

She's very, very skilled at creating poetry that really seduces you.

And you go through a kind of sequence of of emotions from, you know, real joy in some places to real horror in others.

There's an African American man and he's recorded me in Central Park.

He's recording me and threatening myself and my dog.

I wanted the audience to have a journey.

The moment you walk through the door, you are completely engaged with your senses.

What you hear, what you see, even what you smell, actually.

And so there are spaces in the exhibition for you to really sit and to reflect and to think about life in general.

There were no strangers to sorrow.

Their rights were denied and the people said little and they did even less.

What I think is kind of really powerful here is the fact that the visitor, the viewer, is also implicated somehow in the work.

She's talking to you.

The question she's asking are questions for the viewer.

The question is, what are you going to do about it?

The body lay in the opened, uncovered and exposed.

Question everything.

Question democracy.

Who is curious?

Who is conscious.

That is the thing that I want my audience to leave with.

Who are we now?

What do we change?

What do we want?

What do we care about?

What I hope people feel is that they were in a place where they felt connected with themselves.

And to actually think about their own role in this world and how they want to feel, how they want to live, and not just accept the reality that is built around us, but actually realize that you have an impact on this environment.

That's everything that is now our reality is built by humans.

It's about us starting to build a new environment and starting to decide how the future will look like.

I think this idea of immersion is really interesting in relationship to the moment we're currently in.

Coming out of isolation, being in the world again and I think people are hungry for things that really excite all of the senses and really make us think about our body as something, you know, fully plugged into something again.