The installation ‘Sensorial Skins’ focuses on the sculptural capacities of everyday organic materials: skins, membranes and biofilms.
Sensorial Skins are complex surfaces of contact. They arouse our senses through their materiality, their textures, their pigments and their smells. Some of these fabrics are grown by bacteria, others are the result of transformative processes reminiscent of an alchemical practice but now grounded in fieldwork and scientific methodology.
The installation ‘Sensorial Skins’ at P.A.R.T.S consists of a table with skins, an aquarium with living symbiotic organisms, and a video installation in collaboration with choreographer Fabrice Mazliah.
Aquarium with Acetobacter xylinum _brussels (2024)
In a large aquarium, a fermentation process is taking place. The generative process is in a constant state of transition. This is the place where the Sensorial Skins are created. The
bacterial woven fabric reacts to variable invisible factors as temperature, humidity and the local enzymes in the water and the air. Every newly grown Sensorial Skin is thus the unique result of the specific site were it is grown, with its own metabolism and aesthetic specificities.
Table wih skins
The Sensorial Skin will expand, curl and harden with air temperature or humidity. They are called Sensorial Skins to emphasize their living and evolving nature.
With a flair of everyday aesthetics, the installations transform the natural in the cultural. They translate collaborative practices between humans and micro-organisms; they unveil the processes by which everyday organic matter is transformed into tactile bio fabrics.
In turn, these newly shaped materials become the elements for soft sculptures, their pigments catching the sunlight when draped over metal structures. They invite us to touch them. They live. Their responsive biomaterials shrink, harden or soften in response to the humidity and temperature of their environment.
Video installation in collaboration with Fabrice Mazliah
In 2022 Fabrice Mazliah developed a performance for the P.A.R.T.S students in collaboration with An Marie Maes.
The performance is inspired by the work of biologist Lynn Margulus and her understanding of the human body, as an ecosystem cohabiting with multiple other life forms. This performance explores what it means to experience ourselves, our bodies as not strictly human but as a community of interrelated and interdependent organisms, cohabiting and inter-reacting with one another, providing for each other, living together.
In this co-being exercise, various elements are invited such as the sensorial skins.
Anne Marie Maes is an artist who explores the boundary between nature, art, and science. She uses scientific and biotechnological methods to explore living systems and ecosystems as artistic subjects, created with biological, digital, and traditional media. In ‘Sensorial Skins,’ she focuses on the transformative power of bacteria, highlighting the natural processes of collaboration and symbiosis.”
Anne Marie Maes