We Are Vibrating Subjects
Gentian Rhosa Meikleham & Roos Dijkhuizen
Curated by: Bobby Paul Sayers
Trophy Room, Liverpool 2018
The element of the unheard is continually permeating our lives, our culture, and our bodies. As subjects, vulnerable to the vibrations pervading our skins, we have no way of armouring from invisible infiltrations. In the air, unheard electromagnetic frequencies and man-made systems of power are circling. In the womb, an ultrasonic apparatus detects life.
Roos Dijkhuizen and Gentian Meikleham met on a residency at SSW where they collaborated for the first time. Finding ties in their political interests around feminism and collectivity, Roos and Gentian continued a dialogue, which forms the basis for this exhibition.
Considering the role of costume as an active agent in the ‘othering’ of the body, the sculptural forms seek to place you outside of yourself. In ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ Donna Haraway outlines a rejection of a feminism that is based within identity politics and instead celebrates the emancipation of rigid boundaries; notably blurring boundaries between human, animal and machine. Through her call to challenge the necessity for the categorisation of gender, the ‘cyborg’ has inspired the making of these costumes, which at once calls for a celebration of the ‘other’ whilst making contact through vibration.
The element of vibration becomes an unheard infiltrator, not seen but felt, a sonic thread that binds us to each other involuntarily. Sound can extend further than our physical bodies can hear. Vibrations agitate and take us away from the dominance of language; akin to a non-verbal communicative force. In our logocentric culture where we privilege verbal language as the predominant form of communication, vibration becomes a reverberation, echoing back through other entities, connecting us with the non-human, the gestating particle, the collective unconscious.