PROJECT

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.

During her residency in wpZimmer she is experimenting with ‘reconfiguration-processes’, where she tries to materialize invisible internal processes into so called ‘ghost-cloths’. During 3 hour one-on-one sessions with different participants they are looking for presences and try to make them appear through speech, images, movement and in the end create a script on how to materialize them into a ‚body-form‘ with fabrics. Through the documentation of each step a script for the new ‘body-figure’ is created. These are then produced together with artist and costume designer Janneke Raaphorst.