·L·e·a·k·y··W·a·l·k· (2023) was part of Performing Landscapes festival at IKOB Museum für Zeitgenössische Kunst in Eupen (BE) on the 2nd of September 2023. For this edition of the work, I combined several instalments into an unfolding durational experience.
1. On display in the museum’s spaces were microbe costumes and small porous bags, made of fermented naturally dyed canvasses. The bags were filled with marl and gravel from the Kunrader and Sibber quarries, river sludge from the river Waal, birdseeds, fossils, sponges, flint, and tagetes from my work The Blue Carpet. Inserted into the bags was a text by poet and curator Roy Voragen, collectively read in the space to mark the start of the walk.
2. The performative walk led participants in a single line from inside the white cube to outdoor space. Walking bodies, carrying bags, were leaking traces of the residue collected during my Performing Landscapes residency. Returning soil, seeds and sponges to the landscape while walking brings awareness to the imprint our physical presence leaves – ephemeral or permanent, we modify while we move.
3. The walk arrived at a 1.90m deep hole, dug in the field, leaking scents of moisty soil. Participants were invited to vertically enter the earth in a Macrobe: a microbe costume made of decomposed cotton. The fabric, dyed by me with plants that I had cultivated before, had been buried in the garden of residency host Greylight Projects for five months. Once unearthed, I used the fermented fabric to sew the microbe costumes and leaky bags.
Many thanks to fellow diggers Lizzie Veldkamp and Karlijn van den Broek.
