In this talk, Marloeke van der Vlugt introduces her artistic research method Touching by describing how repeatedly passing through a pedestrian tunnel over the course of several months afforded a series of performative and caring gestures to emerge over time. Using diverse audiovisual media, she explains how the tunnel evolved into an expanded scenographic research site. Its direct, pertinent impact on her daily rhythm prompted her to become still and receptive, evoking an awareness of her sensory and material engagement with more-than-human entities, objects, and the environment. These diverse aesthetic encounters activated an ethical stance toward the world. Gradually, the tunnel was transformed into a ‘carescape’, an exploratory site of caring activities that raised questions of response-ability and illuminated the temporal and spatial dimensions of care.
As an artistic research method, Touching invites these emerging movements to be explored through artistic means: performative gestures, drawing, writing, spatial interventions, and sculpture.
Bio
Marloeke van der Vlugt is a Dutch cross-disciplinary artist-researcher based in Amsterdam. Her works have been exhibited and performed in national and international gallery exhibitions and theatres.
She is a lecturer and tutor at the HKU University of the Arts Utrecht and a researcher affiliated with the professorship Expanding Artistic Practices. In 2015, her book Performance as Interface | Interface as Performance was published, in which she explores living in a technology-driven, networked world and its impact on the body. In 2019, she began a new phase in her artistic career with an artistic PhD project investigating aesthetic interaction with materialities—more-than-human bodies, objects, and spaces—through the lens of Touching, completed in 2026.
Walking Arts & Local Communities (WALC) is an artistic cooperation project, co-funded by the European Union, Creative Europe, starting in January 2024 for four years. With seven partners from five countries, WALC establishes an International Center for Artistic Research and Practice of Walking Arts, in Prespa, Greece, at the border with Albania and North Macedonia, backed up by an online counterpart in the format of a digital platform for walking arts.
WALC builds on the previous work of hundreds of artists and researchers already practicing Walking Arts as a collaborative medium, and having met at the significant previous walking arts events and encounters in Greece, Portugal, Spain, France, Belgium, and during online activities at walk · listen · create.
We acknowledge the support of the EU Creative Europe Cooperation grant program in the framework of the European project WALC (Walking Arts and Local Community).
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
| Marloeke van der Vlugt | ||
| Researchgate |
You must be logged in to post a comment.