Elastic Habitat

Where the body ends and identity begins

Elastic Habitat is an immersive installation – you could call it a kind of playground – that invites you to explore, touch, and even carry textile sculptures. Helena Dietrich designed the textile figures with Janneke Raaphorst, based on one-on-one sessions with various guests. In these discussions, they investigated their personal perceptions of their own bodies. Does your personality completely coincide with this body and everything surrounding it? And if you change it in any way, do you change too? You literally inhabit an imaginary body and thus have the time to explore your own identity in an uninhibited, sensory, intuitive way.

• German designer and performance artist Helena Dietrich investigates the importance of symbolism in our aesthetics – and how it is embedded in our identity. She has lived in Brussels for the past four years, and conducts research at A.Pass.

‘These component souls are of many and very different natures, living in territories which are to them vast continents, and rivers, and seas, but which are yet only the bodies of our other component souls; coral reefs and sponge-beds within us; the animal itself being a kind of mean proportional between its house and its soul, and none being able to say where house ends and animal begins, more than they can say where animal ends and soul begins.’
– Samuel Butler, Life and Habit