A living artwork - A Performative Reading, Crocheting, Making, Live-Writing

A living artwork grows, changes, arouses curiosity, demands care, adapts, and decays. Striving for meaning instead of control, the living artwork is time-dependent, drawing attention to the moment, focusing on transformation.

Engaging with living matter in an artistic context means dealing with the (im)possibilities of representing the very core of what makes the artwork come to “live”. Aliveness in art challenges the ways we exhibit, experience, witness, archive or know the artwork. “A Living Artwork” weaves together contradictory elements of a living artwork by embodying those aspects of an artistic process that are often un-representable: the processual, the ephemeral, the growing, the decomposing, the fluid, or the in/animated. The event at Het Glazen Huis is the first iteration of a series of public rehearsals for an ongoing experimental mixed-media publication. The collaborative making of a crocheted webbing around Sonja Bäumel’s living art feeds from a long-term dialogue between fragmented artistic processes, scientific and historical imaging, philosophical thinking, alternative publication practices, and imaginative fabulations. Human bodies are the material agents, which simultaneously inform and contest the difficulty of (anatomically) visualizing and understanding the complexities of what human and more-than-human life might be/come.