Femina Ludens was an exhibition in which solo works and collaborative works were pulled together to weave a story around the figure of the Femina Ludens the playfull woman. Central to the exhibition was the video of Saw_Mill_Gdansk_2021 a performative intervention in a Polish saw mill in which the rules of fiction and ASMR bleed into a normal workday at the mill.

Outside the videotent woodcarvings, costumes, and ceramic instruments all figured in a story that further expanded upon the pressure to perform, the sick body and feminist expressionism. Historic and autobiophical refrences came together in self-published a zine that functioned as a guide to the exhibtion.

solo exhibition Museum van Bommel van Dam

video installation with sculptures of oak, cotton, ceramics

curated by Sjors Bindels

exhibition text

Femina Ludens is an installation that encompasses the themes and thesis of Constant’s New Babylon in reaction to contemporary performance theory. The installation consists of activated and non-activated pieces that all carry a different attitude towards the pressure to perform.

In a non-linear collaborative text, Kitty Maria and her sister Marieke van Ekeren reflect on “the other” in a post-labour condition, the capacity to perform, and feminist expressionism. The exhibition will become a physical continuation of this thinking about, expressing thought through the inherent faculties of an object, a video, a costume.

the ghost of Constant

In a series of video’s, costumes and wooden sculptures Kitty Maria reflects on the work of Dutch Situationist Constant Nieuwenhuys. Situationist International was an international organization of avant-garde artists and political thinkers that synthesized between their different disciplines a comprehensive theory of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.

Central to their criticism was the concept of the spectacle, focussing on the increasing tendency towards the expression and mediation of social relations through objects; the shift from individual expressions of directly lived experiences through the exchange or consumption of commodities.

As a resistance towards the spectacle they promoted a re-evaluation of everyday life; the construction of situations as art, moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening, and the liberation of everyday life. Perhaps in extension to these thoughts, Constant Nieuwenhuys built an extensive sculptural maquette depicting a post-labour city, of which all inhabitants are freed of daily labor through an accelerationist automation process. In this city people no longer needed to exploit their ability to perform for economic purposes. Here they can finally enter a continuous and uninterrupted realm of play.

suits for expressionist dance

The exhibition Femina Ludens uses Constant’s continuous realm of play as a component in a network of thoughts, things and attitudes about our relationship towards the pressure to perform. The continuous realm of play is represented by another reference, a series of fantasized historic dance suits.

These suits reference a microhistory of the German dance couple Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, for whom experiment was a daily exercise of living as well as working. The couple lived in 1920 in an empty apartment with no furniture to be able to experiment daily with movements and form. They tried to exist outside the cultural economy and

refused to get paid. To them dance was an act of spiritual labour. In this exhibition their presence is conjured as a historic example of economic resistance, the unwillingness to rent out your capacity to perform. They are represented through a series of quilted costumes that grew out of the suits from Saw Mill Gdansk_ 22-10-2021. The costumes function as sculptures, and remain unactivated. They are pending in a state of potentiality, like the historic artifact, resisting a compulsive human desire for manipulation.

Saw Mill Gdansk_ 22-10-2021

These suits are exhibited next to the video Saw Mill Gdansk_ 22-10-2021, a performative intervention in a saw mill in Gdansk. In different scene’s Kitty Maria tries out different attitudes to become a part of a normal workday at a saw mill. During a tactile tour of the shop floor, a scene with female wrestlers and an exercise in exhaustion, the predetermined daily reality of work gets interrupted by a foreign logic, like the rules of fiction, the rules of sensory exploration or the rules of play. The video shots are part of a larger body of work in which Kitty Maria performs artistic actions in an economical context, to have the cultural ideas about performance coincide with industrial definitions of performance. Competing with their difference in logic, value and desired outcome.

The exhibition Femina Ludens encompasses themes of performance, potentiality. In it Kitty Maria blurs the boundaries between the anecdotal and the theoretic, the biographic and the academic in a proposition to reconsider our own motive to act. To become creatures of New Babylon, reappropriating our capacity to perform and enter a continuous realm of play.