Headmachine

LIVEXPERIMENT
2019 Kleine Humboldt Galerie, Berlin

Material: wearable sculptures, MUGSHOES, honeycombs, petroleum jelly, plant installation

Credits: Photo © Jonny Brooking & Liz Stumpf



Headmachine is a site-specific intervention within the spacefarming greenhouse in Berlin-Dahlem—a realm of technical optimization and artificial fertility. Amid this highly functionalized environment, abstract, vividly colored wearable sculptures emerge, anonymizing and expanding the body while challenging its contours. The livexperiment embedded within the installation of plants and wearables conceives the body as a permeable interface—a membrane between inside and outside, between self-image and dissolution, between ego and counter-ego: an internal resistance that eludes, shifts, distorts, and renders the self-image porous. In contrast to the standardized cultivation methods for plants designed for the non-place of outer space, which in Dahlem focused on tomatoes, Headmachine opens a space of potential indeterminacy.