Juliette Hengst, (She/They) , born in Enschede, raised in the Middle East, based in The Hague

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In the Hague, when you want to get rid of your furniture or things you throw them out on the street. When a friend of mine started making clay from soil, I realized I could make materials out of trash. I started taking apart the furniture and found styrofoam, wood, textile, leather hardware, electrical parts and speakers. I also find values of rationality, left behind by the enlightenment. Black and white, cause and effect, these logical tendencies sometimes hinder our view on what is right in front of us.

In an arts environment of temporary exhibitions during a climate crisis, the act of reusing trash feels like magic. I see myself as a forager in this. Suddenly an un-recyclable, earth dooming object becomes something else, an artwork, saving a proportionally tiny amount of waste from the incinerator. These ubiquitous and intimate materials are the site of our personal lives, with our experiences imprinted on them.

In my foraging I also collect stories. I find these in anecdotes from friends, half forgotten memories, eavesdropping on the tram, unverifiable gossip, fantasizing about prehistory, instruction manuals, youtube tutorials and dreams. These are stories of interpersonal connections; love, trouble, violence, unfinished or unraveling endings. These stories often contain a gray area where knowledge and feeling conflict, interpersonal violence or an electrical experience. I take these narratives as testimony. Like a mathematical proof I draw them out and turn them into compositions to try to find what hides in between. This way I try to decipher logic with logic.

Electricity and sexual violence are two important subjects in my practise. In both of these subjects there is a danger, often hiding in plain sight, concealed by a lack of knowledge, assumption or fear. They are things we are continuously in contact with, but its complexity leaves most of us with our own fables to tell us how to act around it and why.

Material, narratives and art pieces are honing into rules that eventually unravel themselves. Combining pieces to sketch an alternative to the limitations we rationally take as fact, our domestic surroundings become fantastical when you put its pieces under the looking glass.