I am an art practitioner with an experimental approach to performance, text-based research, and publishing. I use artistic strategies in an interdisciplinary way in order to enter dialogues with collaborators and audiences around intangible and subjectively embedded aspects of role performance and social conditionings.

For some time now – since experiencing the eventuality of death and the responsibilities coming with it while also developing a chronic sickness -, what interest me is how people contract obligations that tie them to the performance of subjectivity and social roles in life. Partly due to my position as woman-artist-mother-migrant-worker-patient, however white, cis-gender and with an European passport, my attention focuses on how some are limited and prevented from gaining visibility as self-determined subjects in contractualism, while still incarnating instrumental forms of (gendered, sexualised, racialised, minoritized) otherness. 

Initially looking specifically into women’s relationship to mortality and death, my practice research has been supported so far by feminist readings and critiques of political economy and contract theory. It is enlarging to consider queerfeminist perspectives on the death worlds of multiple situated subjectivities. It advances with a sensibility akin with the reconceptualization of death into a care for the dying, as framed within the emerging field of Queer Death Studies.

Working within the arts on the topic of death and gender, questions raise about what death re/produces in the field. Thinking about transmission of work and practices of creative endeavors, this complicates the acquired knowledge on passing and legacy-making that is based on value estimation/appraisal. 

As an artistic methodology, I often start by looking into everyday norms and conventions that prompt the enactment of procedures and contracts. By adopting their stiff, regulatory vocabulary and staging their protocols, rhetorical qualities and functioning allow me to present subjectivity as a construct – a referent for defining personal and communal legality and governmentality – that is constantly shifting between embodied and disembodied modes of existence in language. Touching upon the topic of human mortality, the work reflects on the mortality of subjectivity and personhood, too.In this modality of practice research, I call upon a sense of performativity that can be defined as the tension and disposition of something to perform or resist performance (especially in regard of identity and personhood). Searching for it in written, oral and bodily languages, I can explore the sites in which fixations and modes of containment of human subjectivity reveal an effort that is an enforcement, inflicted upon what cannot be contained and resolved – liveness.

This way of proceeding often leads to the construction of narratives that use my story as one among possible case studies, questioning personal and social governance and researching new rules of engagement through artistic activist means. I aim at making public a level of personal narration by involving possible audiences into acts of witnessing and positioning. Often, Idevelop experimental setups involving scripts enacted by immaterial audio tracks that accompany performers performing for a present audience. Overall, a multi-layered practice then compiles through writing scripts, scoring and interpreting bodily acts, dramatizing movements, recording audio and video projects, creating documental evidence of procedures contracts and negotiations. The approach seeks to remain performative throughout the various incursions into creative media and the iterations of works’ narratives.

I enjoy collaborative endeavors based on friendship and personal connection. Recently, with artist and process work therapist Savannah Theis (CH, UK), we produced work on the language of symptoms and bodily utterance. With writer and curator Isabelle Sully (AU, NL), we developed work on the idea of a feminist shared authorship, while she also often curated the presentation of my research into death management. With artist Leon Filter (D) and poet Flora Valeska Woudstra (NL) we initiated a publication delving into the Western culture of death. For artist Maike Hemmers (D, NL), I have been interpreting scores of self-care in pandemic times.

Between 2009 and 2015 I was actively part of the duo Curandi Katz with artist educator Nathaniel Katz (CAN, USA). The joint artistic work explored the structures that make of ‘contact’ a literal and metonymic form of incorporated (personal or impersonal) relationship. Often the work devised participatory and socially engaged modes of engagement with ideas and concepts, from workshops to immersive performances and hands-on installations, to lecture performances and the offer of reading rooms. With movement researcher Masako Matsushita (ITA, JPN), Curandi Katz inquired the disciplinarization of movement and the liberatory possibilities inscribed in the expressive and interpretative actions of human bodies.