September - December 2024, Rotterdam
subtitle
"Be your own parasite" is an ongoing project that delves into the concept of becoming a postmortem creature while exploring the role of health and curing in modern architecture and the obsessive desire for the 'perfect' and ‘healthy’ body, as shaped by social and cultural norms. This project examines the intersections between parasites, bodies, ideals, and the spaces they inhabit, questioning the binaries that arise, such as those between life and dead, sick and being cured.
The parasites are not destroying or altering systems but rather creating a new system that forces us to think beyond the dominant patterns of life, beaty and health. Michel serres suggest that there is no life without the parasite —a clean “garden” doesn’t exist. Systems constantly transform themselves and exist in multiplicity. The skin and the body are what serres calls “spaces for transformation” (Serres 2008, 71). To parasite is to transform.
The host, the habitat and the parasite are creatures that thrive through a life cycle of birth, desire, harvesting, death, and renewal. How we might reshape our understanding to accept the body as a living, uncontrollable habitat? The project seeks to acknowledge multiplicity and step out of the collective neurotic loop to become more-than-human—thereby becoming parasitical on oneself.
Serres, Michel. 2008. The Parasite. Edited by Lawrence R. Schehr. 1st Univ. of Minnesota Press ed., 2. print. Posthumanities 1. Univ. of Minnesota Press