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
concept Helena Dietrich in collaboration with Janneke Raaphorst | hosts/performers Julien Bruneau, Esta Matkovic, Irina Lavrinovic, Janneke Raaphorst, Helena Dietrich | research and one-to-one sessions with guests Helena Dietrich with David Liver, Isabel Burr-Raty, Julien Bruneau, Katharina Smets, Lili M. Rampre, Lynn Suemitsu, Miriam Rohde, Veridiana Zurita | textile bodies Janneke Raaphorst with Carly Rose Bedford, Dieneke Hol, Marija Sujica, Nevin Uzun, ruralurban | set creation Leila Boukhalfa | sound design Lynn Suemitsu | voices Julien Bruneau, Justine Maxelon, Irina Lavrinovic, Thomas Proksch, Varinia Canto Vila, Freek Willems | sound technics Kenny Martens | light design Michaël Janssens | printed matter, text and design Helena Dietrich | redaction Elke van Campenhout | proof reading Patrick Lennon | dramaturgical advice Heike Langsdorf, Marialena Marouda, Julien Bruneau | scenographic and artistic advice Miriam Rohde, Veridiana Zurita | co-production Buda, Eau&Gaz, Kunstenwerkplaats Pianofabriek, nadine vzw, WP Zimmer | with the support of Kaaitheater, Campo | supported by the Flemish Government and the Flemish Community Commission
