Lili Vanderstraeten
Lili Vanderstraeten is performer, creator and curator of events. She is fascinated by co-creative ways of making art and the multiformity of textiles. Her work departs from daily routines of care such as walking, sleeping, cooking, reading ... which she experimentally loosens from their monotonous patterns to create new sensory experiences. By putting analogue and tangible experiences in the centre Lili wants to propose a soft alternative to contemporary opposing structures. To break vast boundaries between different roles of individuals in playful ways, to research together ‘what happens then’?
Lili graduated in 2017 from the Royal Institute for Theatre, Film and Sound in Brussels where she studied theater directing, obtained her master in 2019 in Performing Arts at the Iceland University of the Arts in Reykjavik and she currently is enrolled in the program Creative Producing at DasArts in Amsterdam. Since 2020 she shares the artistic lead over the research project Spa for Spirits together with artist Leonie Buysse. Spa for Spirits is an experimental wellness center that is operated by otherworldly creatures. The platform engages with various other artists and not-artists, cultural houses and community centers, to build landscapes in which visitors can land and charge their bodies to rituals that arise in the interaction between performer and visitor.
During the residency at Kaos Lili will develop a new body of work called 'Huskrooms': a growing archive of duvets that carry carefully composed found objects and cloth.
Lili gathers the materials during long walks with friends, family, strangers and collaborators: going to thrift shops or collecting old sheets left behind in dusty closets and boxes in the attic. Next, the materials are put together during a focused research on colors and textures, in a search for poetics and meanings that arise through the friction of bringing together abandoned materials that usually are not brought into the same space.
All of this is part of an important practice of spending time together. To open up space for verbal and non-verbal playful conversation around the topic of care. Gestures and thoughts that come up during this joint process are intuitively included in the making of these duvets. The duvets are put together in a time-consuming process of cutting and sewing the artwork, simultaneously creating little performative happenings. Lili will share this practice and engage in this way with the people and entire context of the psycho-social centre.
Poem as an ode to the project written by Henny Baeken:
Finding sheltering shell-selves
on harmless whistled
scareless scarless fingertips
Half-armed leaning defines
the broken chair chains
of goodness interferes
Bending the stuffed toy necks
next to the one-eyed winding ups
is there in blinking eyes
The newborn’s glaze
the breastfeeding of mankind’s
mammals with enigmatic weeds of wisdom’s
Care
Info: HERE
