Marloeke van der Vlugt

Profile

In an age when touch and tactility are often associated with risk and taboo, artistic practices can encourage us to explore the sense of touch. What aesthetic experiences can museums, theaters, art academies, and universities offer to bring the senses into balance and to (re)evaluate our tactile interaction with the world?

Marloeke van der Vlugt creates sculptural and spatial installations that invite the public to interact with bodies, organisms, objects, and materials in a non-hierarchical way. Her goal is to raise awareness of the reciprocal nature of our being-in-the-world. She shares the vision of philosopher Jane Bennett, who argues that all materialities possess their own form of agency and a dynamic relationship with their environment. To enable the experience of this open worldview, her installations grant the audience or participants the time and space to explore events that arise from the reciprocal relationship between their own bodies and other materialities. She employs strategies such as multisensory activation, spatial design, or guided tours to sensitize the audience or participants to a world populated by active, changeable entities rather than passive objects.