Eddie de Goër
Eddie de Goër, born in 1995 in Clermont-Ferrand, France, lives and works in Bremen, where they completed their master class study at the University of the Arts in 2023. Primarily through installations, often incorporating everyday materials as well as elements of video, performance and publication, de Goër’s work interweaves the personal, the impersonal and the interpersonal, exploring how social dynamics and structures shape subjectivity.
Of safety nets
EDDIE DE GOËR
Nets can be used to support, to carry, but also to keep away and separate, just like social networks can be used to connect, to care, but also to gatekeep and exclude: a core element of capitalistic power structures and their maintaining of hierarchies, yet just as central to the care structures vital to resisting. Structurally, a safety net and a wire fence have a lot in common… And both are seen, from different perspectives, as carriers of security — as are the supporting and the dividing networks.
Occupied by capitalistic logic and reactionary forces, safety/security has been disconnected of the needs of those who lack it the most and the marginalized, or often even weaponized against them. When it comes to who ought to be protected from whom, positions are often reversed — affecting queer people among many others. Can other narratives of safety make the gaps in this concept visible? Where are nets-as-connections to be found — emotional security and the safety generated by community — against capitalist nets-as-fences?
Various kinds of weaving, interlacing, knotting and knitting generate nets with each their own set of structures and behaviors, with varying holding and porosities — much like human networks can be structured in very different ways, thus enabling different relationships.
The aim for this residency is to experiment with netmaking as an interactive practice: a medium to reflect on one’s own interconnections; on the social tissues one is and has been a part of and their relation to one’s sense of safety; on one’s ability to move and be held within those connections; on the forms of social networks one desires for. Co-netmaking could also be a tool to explore aspects of a shared connection.
WORKSHOP
A net without gaps is merely a fabric
23. November 2024
13:30-18:00
Arbeitszimmer thealit
St.-Jürgen-Str. 157/159
Bremen
If gaps are what make a net… Is this net then determined by the role of its gaps? What differentiates a net-as-barrier from a net-as-carrier, and can one be turned into the other? Can the very making of a net generate structural insecurity? What does a safe net even look like? Does this differ from one person to the next? Which compromise to seek between stability and flexibility, between structure and fluidity? If, say, “The paradoxical, with a safety net — It’s not something that is external to you and holds you — You’re also part of the net”, what is your contribution to this net? And: can exploring material net-work(s) — through observation, intuition, conversations, and perhaps making or mending them — teach us something about the human net-work(s) we need to keep us safe?
Register at info(at)eddiedegoer.net
WORKSHOP
first the tension is always shifting
24. November 2024
13:30-18:00
Arbeitszimmer thealit
St.-Jürgen-Str. 157/159
Bremen
Netmaking, regardless of the method, typically requires a careful handling of tension. Imbalances can affect the behavior of the mesh, the gaps, and the stability of the whole structure, and shifts in one point can easily be felt throughout the whole network. If creating the net from unstable anchor points — people, for instance —, all the trickier the play of tension, turning this collective netmaking into a playful opportunity to explore attunement, cooperation, communication, but also flexibility and compromise to collectively attain a “safe net”.
Register at info(at)eddiedegoer.net
Both workshops will be held primarily in English, but some translation to German is possible.