| art.description.project | A TIME TO EXCHANGE: SCHOOL OF FLUID MEASURES
Standard measurements such as kilo-grammes, metres, and hours suggest objectivity and independence from a given context. Nevertheless, their true meaning only unfolds in relation to a specific situation, object, space, or time.Like social values such as freedom, individuality or safety, the interpre-tation of time is a construct based on the Western convention of clock time. What happens if we step away from the hours, minutes, and seconds that make up standard time and allow ourselves to be guided instead by our body, our experiences, our memories, and lived life? School of Fluid Measures was designed by Judith Seng as a way to reflect on human value systems through embodied experience instead of theo-retical thinking. In a series of perform-ative negotiations, this installation can be perceived as a collective learning process. In School of Fluid Measures, knowledge unfolds over time, over the course of a conversation, and over the course of the exhibition itself.
Perhaps learning is less about knowing or memorising what something is than understanding how it continuously changes in relation to something else. In the School of Fluid Measures, fixed standards and positions are dissolved through scored interactions that leave traces in coloured sand. The patterns that emerge are an exploratory measure of the fluidity of meanings, and the col-ours represent exemplary social values as resources to debate, distribute, and fuse into new colours and values. What is learning? That is the question Judith Seng explores in School of Fluid Measures. Perhaps learning should be less about knowing and memorising and more about understanding how everything continuously changes in relation to something else. This installation, which the artist describes as a school, explores the fluidity of fixed norms and values. According to Seng, social values – like quantifiable hours and weights – are fluid constructs. They vary in time and space and are depend-ent on specific physical actions.Through an embodied process that surfaces situative intentions and rela-tions, the sessions invite participants to negotiate the relationship between two colours and values. Viewed as a series, the sessions intend to explore ways of mediating, materialising, and notat-ing the situated making of meanings and results in a manner that embraces the embodied fluidity of the constant socio-material becoming. The participants’ actions – scatter-ing the sand, shifting it, spreading it out, blowing on it, or creating patterns in it – play a crucial role. For Seng, they reveal how specific actions, interactions, and gestures can influence dialogue. She therefore regards this installation as a school that helps train the mind and that encourages us to reflect on the way we interact with the things around | sv |
| art.description.summary | What if we would talk with sand instead of words? Designer Judith Seng is interested in exploring gestures and body movements as a means of expression.
Her installation with coloured sand invites two people to enter a discussion on how social values such as freedom, collectivity or safety act in relation to each other in situations of our shared daily lives. In light of the current situation, the work allows to transmit such discussions from the private sphere back into a more collective and public dialogue.
We invite you to join a session with a member from your bubble. Please subscribe below. You don’t need an entrance ticket. For more information, you can contact us via bezoeken@z33.be.
The project doesn’t require any prior knowledge. The sessions last 30 minutes to one hour, including introduction, follow-up and documentation of the process. The sessions will be filmed and partly published in the context of the exhibition and documentation of the work. | sv |
