The Body is a Movement: Join the new DDW Gym
Baltan and Onomatopee @ Sectie-C
21 October - 29 October, 11:00 - 19:00
Our programme is part of the official DDW programme, and you will need a DDW ticket to enter: https://ddw.nl/en/tickets
Location: Sectie-C, Hall 8-B, Daalakkersweg 8, Eindhoven
The body: this collection of organs wrapped in skin, filled with fluids, feelings, and sensations. It is our way to experience and respond to our surroundings, to feel and make sense. It tells us when something is off: when we wake up at night with a rushed heartbeat, our bellies ache from witnessing others' suffering, or our backs hurt from working behind a laptop for too long. While living in capitalist structures, our bodies became vehicles for profit. To be optimised for productivity. To be constantly working. To be efficient and to be quantified. While our basic physical needs, such as sleep, end up as the very last entries of our never-ending to-do lists. Be productive, be active, be beautiful, enhance yourself, walk more, ignore your feelings, keep going. But what about our biological clocks, which know our rhythms and needs? What about the disarming sense of pleasure triggered by flavours, scents or erotic play? These beautiful, astonishing, wondrous bodies of ours, capable of experiencing so much joy and excitement—how can we reclaim them?
The Body is a Movement is developed by Baltan Laboratories and Onomatopee and kindly supported by Stichting Cultuur Eindhoven.
THE GYM
Our Gym is a space for training and rehearsing other ways of being in and with our bodies, whether through movement, rest or connection with others. Eight design projects challenge how we feel and take care of our bodies. Hacking how we move, changing how we listen to our body and exploring how we can feel the world differently through it.
Vitulinum by Eija Ranta. Vitulinum is a video installation examining human skin. The skin is the human body’s largest organ, the outer surface of our physical body, holding together everything it contains. It is porous; through it, the body releases and receives. A threshold between the internal and the external world. www.eijaranta.com
Shape Shifter by Flora Lechner. Shape Shifter deals with the cultivation of the body through fitness culture and questions the obsession with an “ideal” set by society. This project questions whether exercise can become a creative statement rather than a numb addiction. The machine keeps the body in a loop of repetitive, predefined movements. The workout ceases to be a spectacle of the body and becomes a spectacle of action. www.floralechner.com
Training for Another Biased Confrontation by Kaan Hiçyılmaz. Through surveillance, our daily movements are watched, faces are scanned, and limbs are measured. Just by existing, we are constantly producing data to be collected by visual surveillance technologies. In a training environment, you train your body to keep your accurate identity undetectable. Training for: Another Biased Confrontation will showcase the effect of being surveilled to interrogate its threatening potential to shape how we move, behave, and even identify ourselves. www.kaanhicyilmaz.com
Weathering Ports: Sensing, Performing, and Acting Bodies by Yeon Sung. Weathering Ports investigates the pollution of Maasvlakte, an artificial industrial zone within the Port of Rotterdam. The project explores the polluted weather of Maasvlakte as an embodied phenomenon and offers ways to experience this with our bodies. The bike is equipped with sensors collecting data from the biker and its environment. www.yeon-sung.com
Twinning Underneath by Qiaochu Guo. This series of objects blends the space and the body in a way that stimulates the senses, interpreting the experience and speculation of the moxibustion (a medical treatment) in body reparation. Moxibustion leads to self-healing by stimulating the body's internal circulation through burning mugwort above the surface of the body. The moxibustion is a spiritual guide for inclusivity and tolerance, in a gesture of rest, pause and breath to allow the body to recover autonomously. It embraces the body in its anti-modernity manner: it requires to stop, rest, breathe, sleep, and sweat. https://qiaochuguo.squarespace.com/
I am Different by Cheawon Shin. Set in the future, I am Different shows a rich fusion of identities, transcending categories such as race, gender, nationality, and sexuality, allowing individuals to choose and construct their identities creatively and inclusively. I am Different highlights the concept of pursuing uniqueness and how it can sometimes lead to a sense of emptiness and illustrates this with beautiful visuals, music and dance. www.shinchea.one
Sexual Healing by Nienke Helder. Trauma can cause highly complex sexual issues that are often a combination of psychological and somatic symptoms. Sexual Healing offers various ways to (re-)explore intimacy, work through anxiety and have a better understanding of your body. In the gym, there is a mirror to get to know your vulva and a sensory brush to tickle, caress or whip and explore what turns you on. www.nienkehelder.com
Sonic Driving by Laura Papke. Our inner bodies are constantly working, producing, composting, decaying, and degrading. Our body is a whole ecosystem constantly in conversation with itself and the world around us. In Sonic Driving, you hear, experience, appreciate and enjoy your bodily processes. It is a participatory performance that aims to foster collective healing processes through hearing and feeling your heartbeat. www.studiopapke.com
2G Double Gravity Suit by Antal Lakner. The 2G Double Gravity Suit is an experimental attire which makes it possible to consciously experience the hidden force defining our existence: gravity. By doubling the wearer’s body weight, the 2G suit reveals the complexities in maintaining human posture and spatial orientation.
WORKOUT TIMETABLE
WORKOUT TIMETABLE
During DDW, we offer a Workout programme to train your body under the guidance of a designer coach. You can find the time schedule below. Please consider browsing our Eventbrite collection while making sure to book your spot for each workshop you want to join.
The Nose Feather. Coaches: Jasper van den Berg and Barry de Bruin
| 21 October. 14:00 - 14:45 and 15:00 - 15:45 |
Book your spot
How will we move with a feather on our noses? To be a group of people with a feather on our noses can remind us of games we played as a child. Can you feel the tip of the feather in the air as if it were an extension of the body? In everyday life, we use many objects as extensions of ourselves, often only focused on practical matters. A pen, cutlery, a duster. But what does a playful extension do to us? How do we move together? How does it influence the way we relate to each other? More information
Queer Sports Workshop. Coach: Gabriel Fontana
| 22 October, 16:00 - 18:45 |
Location: Gymzaal Urkenhovenseweg (‘t Karregat). Urkhovenseweg 10, Eindhoven
Book your spot (free, no DDW wristband needed)
Join a series of games that reinvent sport as a queer pedagogy. Gabriel Fontana’s method gives people a playful way of experiencing what norms of identity, community, and inclusion mean and how we can bring about change. The games you will play open up spaces for experimentation, play and collective reflection that challenge binary thinking. More information
The Body at Work and the Work of Being a Body. Coaches: Philippine Hoegen and Laura Oriol
| 24 October, 14:00 - 16:00 |
Book your spot
In this workout, we practice self-care, world care and working with and through our body. How can we rest collectively? Use our bodies to take care of our surroundings? Let’s collaborate with our body, activating it as a knowledge centre and a research instrument. More information
Mind the Body, Move Matter. Coach: Nina Glockner
| 26 October, 15:00 - 17:00 |
Book your spot
You are invited to participate in a collective journey to (re-) discover balance, flexibility, coordination, and spatial and social awareness. Nina Glockner will guide you through a series of scores that focus on the ‘Who’, ‘Where’, ‘What’ and ‘How’ instead of the ‘Why’. You will move, play, observe, and listen. To obtain more accurate (body) images of ourselves in relation to others, the space we are in and the materials we are dealing with. More information
Anal Gym. Coach: Organic Cyborg
| 27 October, 14:00 - 15:00 and 15:30 - 16:30 |
Book your spot
In the Anal Gym, you will train your anus, a body part sublimated and relegated as perverted. The workout will mobilise and strengthen this small and hidden body area. Subtly pleasurable, inwardly-focused, sexually complementary, Anal Gym introduces movement exercises for training an erogenous area collectively. More information
Happening unscheduled during DDW | Awkward Cues
Can we unburden our bodies of efficiency, quantification and productivity? During this Dutch Design Week, the first year Social Design Department from the Design Academy Eindhoven will embrace the inefficiency of awkwardness, frustration and uncertainty at the DDW Gym. Through a series of spontaneous public exercises and interventions, the students will embody these emotions as playful social glitches. Their intention is to entice the audience to slow down, be confused and take a break from their routine, allowing a moment to observe their surroundings and embrace the awkwardness.
Participants:
Hila Amar, Elna Aurand, Sara Ballout, Ethen Ben Abda, Andreas Berzdorf, Guillermo Cardenas Gutierrez, Noa Desous Acosta, Jip van Egdom, Nabila Ernada, Julie van Essen, Ottavia Ferraris, Saskia Hartog, David Hernandez Mora, Phoebe Hotopf, Juhwa Lee, James Lu, Alessandra Pandolfi, Violeta Perez Hurtado, Kai Rasmussen, Ysabel Rumkorf, François Sadot, Sandra Saffira, Valdís Steinarsdóttir, Nomi Toirkens, Daan Walder, Ye Wang, Angelique van Wijk, Patrick Zhang, Mark Henning (tutor).