Bodies of fiction

Liminal encounters of mineral-looking entities in the dark entangling and disentangling in unpredictable formations. A primal machine reaches out for touch – her skin is soft, and she is craving for love. Contacts. Collisions. Stillness. The atmosphere is saturated with elementary charge, animating all matter alike.

Mette Sterre presents the first part of her mutli-disciplinary collaboration at Crossing Parallels. For her new project, she combines first class world building with scenography and costume design, giving bodies to the future fictions she builds. With the students of the Minor Advanced Prototyping, she develops miniatur robots to animated her larger than life costume that envelop the wearer. These strecht the limits of the human body into something both other and more than human, allowing us to question the notions of agency outside of humanity.

Mette Sterre is currently working on performative installations with several body masks that are their own beings within the artificial space of her studio. This uncanny environment makes it possible to investigate, both intuitively and rationally, our perception of what we consider to be living matter. The activator/animator/mover of these bodymasks have to submit themselves to the work, creating a new bodylanguage for the non-human body, relating to carnivalesque and fokloric traditions, creating a live other worldly experience. Her polymorphic practice delves into neuroscience, materiality and speculative fictions through robotics, trans-humanism, xeno/glitch feminism and eroticims.

Profile

Mette Sterre

Mette Sterre has a bachelor of Fine Arts from Willem de Kooning Academy, and a MA in Performance Design & Practice from Central Saint Martins. She was a resident at the prestigious Rijskacademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam in 2021 and is a visiting practicionner at Central Saint Martins London and a teacher of Textile Design at Chelsea College of Arts. She has shown her work internationally including at the Prague Theatre Design Quadrinale, the Watermill Center and Cue Art Foundation in New York, Glasgow International, the Trienale Design Museum in Milan, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Migros Museum, London Design Week, Gallery Esmeralda in Curacao and the Museum of Everything in the Kunsthal. She was also featured in Vogue Italy, the Wall street Journal, the New York Times, Artefact Magazine and Volkskrant, NRC, Telegraaf, Parool, Artforum and Xibit Magazine, Metropolis M and others.

website

mettesterre.com