September - December 2024, Rotterdam
subtitle
The project envisions interiors that resist the power of milk, exploring spaces where destruction enables ecological and cultural renewal. Milk, which became an important drink of the 20th century through industrialization and normalization, evolved into a mass-produced and artificial product entangled with gendered and racial politics.
It critiques milk’s role in sustaining exploitative structures, envisioning a path toward ideological transformation. This transformation seeks to disrupt and destroy the fixed binaries of gender and neutrality through acts of becoming- liquid, proposing a continuous process of dissolving into being.
As observer, you see what occurs between the cracks —the created noise. The noise is the smasher, living beyond time and between the fixed, white domestic walls. It finds rituals in everyday objects: cleaning, washing, consuming, destroying, and then repeating.
The smasher seeks to deterritorialize the supposed neutrality of milk by erasing the materiality of the cup, the plates, the tiles, and the body. In doing so, it transforms and creates new realities. The smasher generates noise and intervenes in old signals, producing a new system (Serres 2008, 52) As Michel Serres describes, “systems work because they do not work. Nonfunctioning remains essential for functioning” (Serres 2008, 79).
The role of the hand is to parasitizes the hammer, giving a tool to disrupt and destroy. To cite Serres again: “The hand is no longer a hand when it has taken hold of the hammer, it is the hammer itself.” (Serres 1995, 30) The hammer and the hand become an act of creation, operating as one and producing each other (Colomina and Wigley 2016, 52). The smasher searches for the highest peak in Apollonian destruction and the lowest valley in Promethean creation, establishing a grounding outside the opposites.
The smasher is a nonfunction and oriented towards not knowing, yet it exists, it thrives, it is alive and kicking. It functions as a new pattern — a pattern to become liquid. This is about engaging with difference and escaping the fixed order of hierarchical structures—what Deleuze and Guattari call a “series-structure”(Deleuze and Guattari 2007, 235). The intention is to disrupt and destroy the fixed binaries of gender and neutrality through acts of becoming- liquid, proposing a continuous process of dissolving into being.
References:
Colomina, Beatriz, and Mark Wigley. 2016. Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design. Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Mul̈ler Publishers.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 2007. ‘1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming Imperceptible’. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 12. print. Minneapolis, Minn.: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
Serres, Michel. 1995. Genesis. Translated by Geneviève James. Studies in Literature and Science. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.
———. 2008. The Parasite. Edited by Lawrence R. Schehr. 1st Univ. of Minnesota Press ed., 2. print. Posthumanities 1. Minnesota: Univ. Press.