Helena Dietrich

Elastic Habitat is an immersive installation – you could call it a kind of playground – that invites you to explore, touch, and even carry textile sculptures. Helena Dietrich designed the textile figures with Janneke Raaphorst, based on one-on-one sessions with various guests. In these discussions, they investigated their personal perceptions of their own bodies. Does your personality completely coincide with this body and everything surrounding it? And if you change it in any way, do you change too? You literally inhabit an imaginary body and thus have the time to explore your own identity in an uninhibited, sensory, intuitive way.

“These component souls are of many and very different natures, living in territories which are to them vast continents, and rivers, and seas, but which are yet only the bodies of our other component souls; coral reefs and sponge-beds within us; the animal itself being a kind of mean proportional between its house and its soul, and none being able to say where house ends and animal begins, more than they can say where animal ends and soul begins.”

Samuel Butler, Life and Habit

Elastic Habitat explores the imaginary, invisible and speculative body. It is an invitation to explore and stretch the usual habitat of one’s physical and virtual identity. The public is invited into an immersive installation, a sort of playground, where they can explore and animate textile sculptures. The sculptures are based on descriptions of the multi-layered metaphysical perceptions of one’s body, emerging out of prior one-to-one sessions. In these individual explorations participants are guided into an ‘auto-contemplation’ which results in a reconfiguration of the habitual perception of one’s presence. The descriptions of these perceptions are then formed into textile sculptures, or better textile bodies, each the material result of a momentary reconfiguration of a participant’s habitat.

The textile bodies are explored by the public entering the playground in small groups, through touching, wearing and thereby activating them. By donning these textile bodies, one is inspired or challenged to explore one’s habitual perceptions. It is a metaphorical invitation to get ‘under the skin’ and elude the clear distinction between self and other, inside and outside. Like a mise-en-abyme, these ‘relational objects’ open a perpetual cycle of translation between self and other, inside and outside, looping from feeling to movement, to language, to form and material, and back to sensation. The invitation to play with and through these textile bodies offers a space of childlike pleasure and intuitive exploration within oneself and the other, to think and perceive oneself through the senses.

Première: autumn 2017 – Veem House for Performance (Amsterdam)

credits

Concept: Helena Dietrich in collaboration with Janneke Raaphorst
Research & individual sessions: Helena Dietrich
Textile bodies: Janneke Raaphorst
Sound design: Lynn Rin Suemitsu
Scenography in collaboration with Miriam Rohde
Co-production: Buda, wpZimmer, Eau&Gaz, nadine, Pianofabriek
With the support of Kaaitheater, CAMPO, Zsenne Art Lab

Critical Techno is a reflective lecture dance meditation—a continuous dialogue between listening, dancing, words, music, movement, physical sensations, constellations and bodies in space. Together with Thomas Proksch, Helena combine a special selection of texts with visceral sounds+hypnotic beats and open the mic for collective reformulations. For this 2nd edition of Critical Techno ‘So, do you believe in spirits?’, questions will unfold around otherworldly body experiences, paranormal perceptions and the conditions to communicate with spirits and other entities. The dynamics of thoughts, the spirits of texts become our choreographers, moving our bodies and manifesting in a momentary dance-ritual, a temporary community.