Cygnet is a consensus building tool for peer review and resource allocation developed by Blackswan DAO (Calum Bowden, Laura Lotti, Leïth Benkhedda, Penny Rafferty)

Video credits:
Direction: Trust & Serpentine R&D Platform
Production: Trust and GVN908
Editing: Trust
Camera: Shivani Hassard, Maidje Meergans
Music: Billy John Bultheel
Sound design: Joanna Pope
Sound recordist: Greg Oke and Gaston Ibarroule
3D: Malte Zander
Real-time animation: Philip Ullman
Logo design: Son La Pham
Cygnet user interface design and animation: Leïth Benkhedda

BLUE is accompanied by the script The color BLUE in casual conversation with the OCEAN and the SKY, where the three talk about poetry, metaphors, the meaning of life, origins, naming and existence, resulting in the question »If I don’t have a name, do I even exist?« The question itself is materialized in soft and dreamy fabric and brought into space.

FRAGMENTS OF FRAGILITY collects fragmented writings on fragile words and fragile bodies. It is about making the page transparent and revealing what was kept secret and freezing thoughts, feelings and reflections into the material.

SEHNSUCHT, OR; THE DAY I LOST REALITY is a two part poem about projecting my parents into stones and birds. The shown piece is trapping their spirits in the page, leaving them powerless against the words I write through them.

Cloud.io is a web and file server. It's maintained by Lukas Engelhardt and Paul Bille, in an attempt to (re)define the tools they use in their practices as graphic designers, as citizens and general users of technology.

Recently, cloud.io has become nomadic. This state of roaming comes with its own set of complications: Currently a large wifi sail is the only way that it can stay connected to the internet.

For the duration of this exhibition, parts of cloud.io are open to the public to browse through. They contain stories, images, and other snippets of information; a (b)logbook of sorts, kept during the journey towards running your own server.

A multimedia meditation on the flattening of complexity in order to predict and control behavior. Moving towards ambiguity and uncertainty as refuge.

My mothers’s home is not my home is exploring my identity crisis of an young Asian woman growing up in Europe. I am looking for a sense of belonging, acceptance and understanding. I’m trying to create portable roots through making my own shrine which comes from the tradition of Ancestors Worship. The shrine symbolises for me not just the belief in your dead ancestors, but it also comes with the notion of the ”moral debt to our grandparents” and the organisation of the patriarchal, heteronormative and conservative society which I’m questioning.

A young woman wakes up on a toxic hill in the Westpoort, the harbour district of Amsterdam. After a heroic climb to the top, she discovers strange plants that put her in a trance. She re-awakens, only to start her journey again.

A variable type, that behaves according to your movement. This work-out combines the usually immobile workplace of type design and a place where you can experiment with your body in different types of movement.

Tarrying with Disgust is a glimpse into a research which deals with Consumption, Repulsion, Disgust, Pleasure and Fetish. While reflecting on my own identity I found all of these words present.
The research around disgust began with the curiosity in how and when disgust is perceived as substance or as structure. Because we tend to think of disgust as a primitive or basic emotion we tend to overlook its intimacy. Disgust challenges us to question our direct reality, bodily and intellectually. As Carl Plantinga puts it into words, , disgust ‘begins as a guardian of the mouth, extends to the protection of the “temple of the body”, and finally becomes the guardian “of human dignity in the social order”. Disgust allows us to questions the relation of corporeality and cognition, affect and emotion and thus sociomorality, ethics and politics. Why are you disgusted?

40 minute durational film, installation

This is a first glimpse into ongoing research and enactive experimentations on power, softness, and the safety of a diasporic body-home. In my search to respond to the too-familiar question of “Where are you from?” I found myself uncovering my own myriad of embodied identities, observing how they have often been forced to shape-shift within the looming dichotomies of public space. In my search, these three simple, but potent words in particular have come to my attention. My research question is pending, but has been hovering around as such → How can states of transience, disorientation, and transcendence be understood through queering, or mystifying, the archival and diasporic body?

In my time-based research, I will be working with super 8 videos of my father’s childhood, filmed by his father in the 1950’s in New York, and videos of my own childhood, filmed by my father in the 1990’s in New York.

Born in the Sea of Galilee in 1960, my mother was a model and actress in the 1980’s. My father, an American designer born in 1947, worked as a photographer and art director for Ford Models and Chess Records in New York City during the 1970’s and 80’s.

As my father passed away when I was only 12 years old, I have spent the last 18 years of my life looking through both his body of work and this footage obsessively — an attempt to better understand how he looked at me, and how he experienced the world.

In doing so, I have also found myself revisiting past bodies of masculinity and femininity in my own childhood footage. I have noticed how my embodied expressions of gender and sexuality shift, depending on who is holding the camera and how they choose to interact with me. I can clearly see how my body language shape-shifts to my parents’ different gazes, as understood via the camera lens, indifferently to whether I am told to pose or told not to pose. I want to expose these moments, in which my sexuality was frozen within the roleplay and power dynamics of the moving image. I hope to unfold these “on-and-off-camera” scenarios into a narrative which cannot be told in linearity.

I first noticed it on an an early morning a few years ago, a pinhead fixed low in the grey over the city. It had no trajectory, no zenith it worked towards, although the more I saw it, the more it seemed to grow, slowly eating at the sky. Did we wonder what it was? A trick of optics played by the atmosphere or an astral visitor, a foreign body from another galaxy? I don’t remember if we asked those questions back then. We had become transfixed. It seemed to demand something of us.