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Access modes for encountering large industrial bodies HD video, 20’13” Maarssen (2020)

In this work Kitty Maria engages with a windtunnel set-up for calibrating windsensors. Calibration machines are relational type of machines and perform feedbackloops of functionality, exploiting a meta set- up to calibrate a meta instrument to calibrate the local set-up to calibrate the protagonist instrument.

In this video she tries to establish a fringe relationship outside its general function, employing the problem of the access mode as an investigation apparatus in finding ways for a person to meet a machine with no specific desire to operate it. Bypassing the machine-operator relationship to perform a highly tactile and phonetic examination of the prerequisites of the object, producing alternative information than its general use or output power, expanding on ways to encounter a large industrial body outside its functionality.

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Storytelling with Technologies for Fire Retardation, 4k video, 20′ 00′ —  Bleiswijk (2020)

A moment of conceptual storytelling while a glass wall partition is burned and tested in the fire-testing company Efectis. With various fire testing set-ups they monitor the speed of combustion in construction and household materials, testing the performance of objects in calamity. - In each assembly line, a few objects have to be sacrificed and burned for the rest to be allowed free passage to the free market. - The company allowed me to tell stories while they were running a test in their big furnace, addressing the social function of fire, and creating a cross pollination of ideas on performance, how the object performs, the workers perform and the artist performs. Will be viewable in Amsterdam in june 2020.

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Soft Landings Showroom

Neverneverland, Amsterdam 2018

Soft Landings appraises the phenomenon of industrialised speculation on unfortunate events and disaster. They map the interpersonal and corporate tendency to favor the worst case scenario, from a scratch or a burn to extraterrestrial attacks and solar flares. These conceptions of insurmountable problems are used as the basis of a series of examinations of discomfort and catastrophe. Whether opportunistic or circumspect, the responses to crisis by cyclopean commercial entities are brought to an empathic level through individual arts practice. How might the lone programmer, performer or wood-turner manifest an industrial response to the inevitable?

For The Soft Landings Showroom, 200 white injection-molded, heavy-duty transport cases are currently travelling from Ningbo, CN to Amsterdam, NL. Eventually, they will each house a series of artist editions – a hermetically sealable white-cube group exhibition. These cases purport to be future proof, totally resistant to water, dust, shock and impact. They will live for a far longer time than any visitors to the Showroom. For this reason, they take their rightful place as the protagonist in an examination of a fully materialised aspect of industrial speculation: the product testing phase.

The Soft Landings Showroom is an expanded view of industrial testing cycles made to determine the performance and functionality of an object by its compliance to human interaction and the natural environment. The de-industrialised bespoke devices and interventions of the Showroom invite the audience to engage with disaster through the experiences of their protagonist object, and speculate on what the cases may one day contain.

This project is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts).

Soft Landings is an artist collective consisting of Eurico Sa Fernandes, Alban Karsten, Tom Kemp and Kitty Maria. All based in Amsterdam, the four members bring together a scope of performance, programming, film and installation-based practices. The first iteration of their togetherness concerns an exhibition space able to withstand extreme circumstances.

www.thesoftlandings.com

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A STATIC LOAD TEST FOR SEAT AND BACKREST

Video 8 min in loop, 2017 Wagenigen

Meeting and complying with European quality, safety and resistance standards.

The static load test is a performance test for chairs, in which the objects repeatedly undergo a set amount of static pressures on the seat and seat- back.

In this segment of the testing cycle, performance is examined by its endurance, in terms of tenacity and exhaust. The static loads are made after the human body, compulsively taking a seat. Ten years of sitting down and standing up is compressed into a two- week trial, to eliminate any interruption or error in the utilization of the product, or to very precisely plan the moment of exhaust.

This work is an inquiry into a simulation industry, an industry most simply explained by its two characteristics: one - the simulation of nature, in storm cabinets and climate rooms, the second made up out of anthropomorphic machines, which resemble the human body but engaged in only one movement forever. 

The film is the result of a first infiltration in the automated production site of things, here I enroll in the durability test myself, sprung from a desire to understand empirically, and to be touched. The image shows the terms of safety we wield, a perversion of time by efficiency, or an animated body mirrored by a ‘real one’, a simple comparison of kinetic properties.

Camera by Anna Laederach

Company SHR Wageningen

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HOSTING AIR

Palais de Tokyo, Do Disturb (Paris, 2016)

ongoing research on the unemployed uniform

“If we are to believe relational spacetime theory, then space does not exist unless there are objects in it; nor does time exist without events. We’ll host within these rules of relativity, but then taking air as a measure to all other things.”

The first female flight attendant was employed in 1930 to both serve and calm passengers with a maternal but alluring presence. Within her role and appearance the feminine ‘soft power’ of seduction and negotiation is combined with a more ‘hard power’ emanation of authority. To examine these ways of exploiting ‘hardened, socially constructed female roles’, we decided to take up the benefits of the uniform without having the duties. As such we have refurnished the Air Hostess concept into Hosting Air - Hosting clear skies and empty spaces.

Since november 2014 we are, proud to say, unemployed Air Hostesses, wearing our selfmade uniforms while being permanently off duty.

But the absence of duties rendered us useless, and sometimes rebelling against this lethargy by performing in small, we found ourselves confronted with difficulties, such as - how to perform without hosting an audience? - as well as more existential questions like - how to host without providing a service? Our response is to presence to a minimum, retreating into a kind of symbiotic mutism, rehearsively wandering and synchronized browsing through passersby. We play between the inevitabel presence of a having a body and the non-presence of a wandering mind.

Kitty Maria and Elise Ehry

(In publications often referred to as Heather and Rosetta.)

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Running w. Pigs on Beach, film 2 min, Bretagne 2016

Plein Air, two week residency Bretagne 2016 with Elise Ehry. Photo’s by Clément Carrat

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Ode an die Freude

Attempt at rhythmic gymnastics in the butchershop, accompanied by the European anthem.

Slagerij de Groene Weg//Arnhem 2014

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Good Wealth Management

Video, 3 day service, Fortune Cat Impersonation

De Chinese Toko//Arnhem 2014

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Daily Solo Show

Introducing all participating artists of the Wandering School with a solo show lasting the duration of one day: from the 1st till the 17th of April, Kitty Maria and Alban Karsten engaged in an on-going marathon of daily build-ups and nightly openings with an opening talk in their Canopy Gallery in M^C^O. Turning the art of exhibition making into a day-to-day labor as a protocol against lethargy and an attempt to investigate and defy the process of exhaustion.

With contributions from:

Anna Reutinger, Elise Ehry, Arthur Tramier & Thomas Schneider, Kolbrún Þóra Löve, Eurico Sá Fernandes, Yiannis Mouravas, Maarten Nico Hoogendijk, Erasmus Scherjon, Aaron McLaughlin, Thijs van de Loo, Carolin Gießner, Cyril Menouillard, Kitty Maria, Aurélien Lepetit, Angi Rrem, Alberto Valz Gris, Nicola Baratto, Valentin Noiret, Rachel-Rose O’leary, Alban Karsten

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Irrlicht

Performing ‘Irrlicht’ by Schubert in the AH XL.

Video 2:44 Min Albert Heijn Xl//Arnhem 2014

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Top: Hosting Air in Collaboration with Deborah Bowmann ‘Grand Salon no 1’, Amsterdam 2015 

Our unemployment started alongside several collaborations with Deborah Bowmann from 2014 in their Amsterdam venue. 

Mid to bottom: First attempts dealing with an inert uniform, hiring limousines to bring us around a roundabout, setting up office, professional portrait photography.

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Kitty Maria (1992, Ottersum)

Performance and film artist, and unemployed airhostess

Exhibitions

2017 Circa...Dit, Faith Money Love (Arnhem, NL)

2017 De School, Proton Decay (Amsterdam, NL)

2017 Extrapool, Arrector Pili (Nijmegen, NL)

2017 Krux, The Bubble in Epistemic Terms (Amsterdam, NL)

2017 Design Biennale, LLCC, En Plein Air (Saint-Etienne, FR)

2016 De Appel Arts Centre, Soft Landings (Amsterdam, NL)

2016 Residentie Brittany, En Plein Air (Bretagne, FR)

2016 Het Nieuwe Instituut, Off the record, (Rotterdam, NL)

2016 Palais de Tokyo, Ethereality (Parijs, FR)

2016 M^C^O, Daily Solo Show (Milaan, IT)

2015 Kunstvereniging Diepenheim, Arcadia (Diepenheim NL)

2015 Deborah Bowmann, Post Norma (Amsterdam, NL)

2015 Het Instituut, Collective Chemistry II (Amsterdam, NL)

2015 Collectief Derde Wal, Remix Reality (Nijmegen, NL)

2015 Gelderland Biennale, Dit Is Kunst (Nijmegen, NL)

2014 Deborah Bowmann, Post Norma (Amsterdam, NL)

2014 De Fabriek, Non-Stop-Plaza (Eindhoven, NL)

2014 Extrapool, Outer Space (Nijmegen, NL)

2014 Paraplufabriek, Kunstnacht (Nijmegen, NL)

2014 Circa... Dit, Ernstig Geschikt (Arnhem, NL)

2014 Circa...Dit, Definitely Unfinished - In Memorian To Raoul Tuerlings (Arnhem, NL)

2014 Filmproject Ga-Lax-Y, Dit Bij Dat (Arnhem, NL)

2012 Residentie Artoll Residence, (Bedburg Hau, DE)

Other

2016 Curator and host of “The Soft Landings” in de Apple Arts Center (Amsterdam, NL)

2016 Interior design new store Fjällräven (Parijs, FR)

2016 Interior design hotelroom “Blue Hotel” Hotel Milano M^C^O (Milaan, IT)

2016 Curator and host “The Daily Solo Show #1-17” for The Wandering School in M^C^O (Milaan, IT)

MASTER OF ARTS AND DESIGN

2014 - 2017   DAD, Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam, NL)

BACHELOR IN FINE ARTS

2010 - 2014  ArtEZ Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (Arnhem, NL)

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Traffic Island

To create conditions for unproductivity and doubt. Construct of an indoor traffic island, a negative of infrastructure for the wandering and lost.

Non stop plaza, de Fabriek//Eindhoven 2014