A Living Artwork

Engaging with living matter in an artistic context means
dealing with the (impossibilities of representing the very
core of what makes the artwork come to “live”. Aliveness
in art challenges the ways we exhibit, experience, witness,
archive or know the artwork.

“A Living Artwork” weaves together contradictory elements
of live art by embodying those aspects of an artistic process
that are often un-representable: the processual,
the ephemeral, the growing, the decomposing, the fluid,
or the in/animated. The event at Het Glazen Huis is the first
iteration of a series of public rehearsals for an ongoing
experimental mixed-media publication. The collaborative
making of a crocheted webbing around Sonja Bäumel’s
living art feeds from a long-term dialogue between
fragmented artistic processes, scientific and historical
imaging, philosophical thinking, alternative publication
practices, and imaginative fabulations.

Human bodies are the material agents, which simultaneously
inform and contest the difficulty of (anatomically) visualizing
and understanding the complexities of what human and
more-than-human life might be/come.