Membrane, Design Museum 2019
Always moving, changing, mutating shedding, growing, responding, secreting, absorbing, bending, shrinking, burning, peeling, dying and being born. Always living, mediating the unseen and mysterious with the mundane worlds.
Membrane was a pop-up installation exhibited at the Design Museum within the event Designing Time curated by Helga Schmid. The installation explored the skin as a performative surface, a lively and self-organising material that mediates our experience of the world. The floating surface created a fragmented threshold by the entrance of the gallery space with a large scale projection of a macro-landscape of moving human skin performing under the inspiration of rhythms and colours of the seven circadian stages defined by Helga in her Uchronia project. Behind the layered surface, a chill area of pillows invited people to lay down and rest. The event hosted performances and talks from 11 artists, designers and researchers.
‘.. it is easy to acknowledge that humans are composed of various material parts (the materiality of our bones, or the metal of our blood, or the electricity of our neurons). But it is more challenging to conceive of these materials as lively and self-organizing, rather than passive or mechanical means under the direction of something nonmaterial, that is, an active soul or mind.’
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter
