Lecturer: Mette Sterre
Dates:16-17-18.05.2025
Time: 14:00- 17:30
This workshop will be a hands-on approach to explore the potential of our bodies in relationship to space, technology and the understanding of the self. We will explore how limitations can be a source of inventions to explore different ways of embodiment and potential for a different sensing of ourselves, each other and the (digital) space around us. The workshop will create a place for experimentation, playfulness and non-judgmental doing in quick assignments and assessments as we will be thinking through doing. Expect to be making mask making, movement exercise and dipping into the digital (a combination of in real life and the digital world). The mind needs input, to be able to put words into action, so we will dip into some theory about embodiment, technology and touch, borrowing form the clutch manifesto of Legacy Russel as well as discussing the grotesque body by scholar Mikhail Bahktain.
For this class Mette is looking for individuals who are eager to explore, are not scared of the unknown and have a love for performance, time-based media and o installations, and have a hands-on approach in making.
There will be some homework/preparation required during the day of the classes.
The class will be held in English
To be part of the class please register in the link below no later than May 12: https://forms.gle/Kgfs4XPRDMpqftQm7
Mette Sterre
Mette Sterre’s creations escape fixed definitions. They exceed performance practice, installation, digital technologies, sculptural body masks and sculpture – potentially expanding their territories without limits. By entering her work we are cast into the materialisation of her mind processes: an unpredictable participatory and sensorial experience, a world of speculative fiction. She investigates how the human contour can be disturbed in the broadest sense, both ideologically and materially, in order to question what more we can be, beyond human beings; avowing to remove the privileged thinking of the human as the Master of the Universe. Utilising her DIY prosthetics, her work is a call-to-arms to break away from the Western obsession with the sanctity of the human form. Mette’s plea is to co-exist with technology, to ally with it, and fashion new ‘assemblages’, following the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the body without organs. She believes there’s a strong connection between the manual labour of making the body masks and the experience of becoming these meta bodies. By producing something otherworldly, tangible, and frictional experience by hand, Sterre’s work gives value to the devalued, both aesthetically and conceptually. Acting as a strategy for disorientation, de-centering and trespassing spatial parameters, linear time, and human certainties. When pertaining to her material research she investigates motion by humans and non- humans. mAnthropomorphising accessible materials as a political act of resistance; to produce in a time consuming, and labor-intensive way, Mette shows the body’s ability to take ownership. This debris allows for an autonomous, affectively charged time and space to emerge and alter our personal lived experiences and collective consciousness. A narrative is developed through play and improvisation. Abjection and desire are at work in this moment to analyse our own preconceived understandings and perceptions. She’s conducting an ongoing formal research of material in motion by humans and non-humans. Through this she questions what it is that makes us human and alive, and what are the boundaries of the animate and inanimate. Holding a Master degree in Perform Design and Practice from Central Saint Martins as well as a Bachelor in Visual Arts, her work is of an interdisciplinary nature. She went to Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten from 2019 -2021 and has shown her work internationally, for example at the Manifesta 14 in Kosovo, the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Platform Theater London, the Watermill Center in New York, Trienale Design Milan, Tent Rotterdam. She has done several residencies such as the Digital Anthropology Lab of UAL London and upcoming MMCA in Seoul as well as the European Ceramic Work Center. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Metropolis M, Berlin Artlink, Wall Street Journal, El Pais and Vogue.
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May Classes 2025 is supported by Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport, KCSF, SMART Balkans