Your Everyday Exuberance (2021)

Are we Human? at Galleri Format

Discarded clothes from strangers, manipulated by me. I’ve fed the living parts of them that remain within the fibres. I want to get to know all of them. I want to get to know the monster, the chimera that we are, in all our exuberance.

Your Everyday Exuberance looks to twilight as it unfolds between life and decay, self and other. Drawing on Jeffrey J. Cohen’s notion of the in-human - the aliens within - the work traces the visceral entanglement with our own microbiome; microorganisms that are us and shapes us, but that most people see as separate from themselves and their bodies. 

Saturated and filled with a variety of agar jellies, and protected in a moist environment, secondhand clothes becomes host a slow microbial bloom. In this process haunting becomes material as parts of the previous owners again visibly inhabits the cloth.

Second hand clothing, various agar mixes, previous owners microorganisms, wood, humidifier.