Nicole De Brabandere

Familiar objects carry with them very specific functions and the suggestion of movements related to these functions. This series of videos experiments with activating compositional tensions between figure, gesture, object and pose in relation to familiar, functional objects, lending them unexpected and sometimes fantastic functions. Staging familiar use-objects is a way to intervene into the cause and effect of everyday utility, allowing diverse movements and qualities related them to emerge in unexpected ways. As these inhabited associations diversely resonate with familiar forms, they generate new ways to think and feel with how inhabited tendencies or recognition, practice and material form co-compose.

The gesture of putting on of a pair of socks goes on for 8-and-a-half minutes repeating until 28 pairs of socks are worn all at once. Over the duration of the process, the everyday routine of putting on socks intensifies as the process generates an intense tension where the difference between socks and skin begins to break down. The accumulation swells the feet and legs into a bulging mass of elastic tension, delocalizing the remembered feeling of the leg into the thick, dense, and numb mass of socks. The felt extremities of the leg become indistinguishable from the outermost surface of the socks—hardening the flesh. As the elastic tension of socks loosens the bounds of figural form, it co-composes differences between accumulation, gesture and tension into emergent orders of feeling. In the process, the mundane task of putting on socks loses periodicity as it becomes a durational intensity that is in excess of figural form or the consistency of habitual refrain.

In walking, the rolling weight of bare footsteps crushes the fine, upright-facing fibres of the Gabbeh rug. The upward ends compose a dense topography that presses out the edges of the landing heels and balls of feet. The residual spring counters the weight of stepping, the bending and pressing aligning the position of steps in an undetermined consistency. This consistency agitates a lure that opens from a different direction, a different dimension. The space beneath the carpet begins to swell in pulsing undulations. Then the approach of a volume, of a rolling forward, lifting and landing between the layers of a body whose extremities are articulated by inside and underside surfaces. The rolling rolls the ground forward before cresting at its edge, where the surfaces of skin, rug and floor finally separate, long enough to take a gasp of clear air. Then the rolling resumes and I again inhabit the foamy absence of presence, the consistency that is as voluminous as it is vacuous, before washing back up onto flat, solid ground with a newly textured, fibrous skin.

Wringing out a saturated terry cloth in a condensation of torsion and the pulse of tighten and relax, of flow and absorption. As the terry cloth twists, it gradually wraps the extremities of hands and wrists up into the intense space of wringing. Cloth and hands enter into a density where the difference between the tightening terry and the squeezing flesh becomes indistinguishable—the tighter the wringing, the tighter the grip. The continuous wringing presses the surface of cloth and the surface of skin in on itself, presses until it releases a few drops, then a steady stream of liquid flows into the bucket below. The intense contrast between the hard tension of wringing and the easy flow of liquid wraps up the corporeal up in an irreconcilable consistency—this is how to bleed oneself dry while being drawing into the force to repeat the action. When the tension gives way it separates with the slow separation of layers of condensed terry cloth, which now sucks the air dry with its parched absorbency. The cloth regains form as if ready to take another breath or another plunge into the boundless circulation of form and feeling.