MASS – bloom explorations

A dancer and a scenography in the process of biological mouldering in a durational performance installation. Here, audiences get firmly in touch with decay, decomposition and death.

“Incredible. It is amazing to see how much there is at stake in the minimalistic simple installation, which is expertly handled by Tina Tarpgaard who, as one of the few performing artists in Denmark, has started working with bio art.”

– Monna Dithmer, Politiken

In a transparent plastic dome, Hilde I. Sandvold and thousands of mealworms live side by side. The micro-universe is created solely out of white foam plastic. Apart from being a huge part of our human throw-away mentality, foam plastic also happens to be a source of nourishment that pleases the ever-hungry mealworms. The potential is born for a new form of symbiosis between species and for an organism that’s capable of living off plastic. It could very well be the blooming of a new species on earth.

Together, the mealworms and Hilde co-create a new space. They conduct a durational choreography: namely, an installation in which the space is slowly but visibly being altered by the worms’ digestion and the human body in motion. The crackling sound of the eating worms blends with the voice of the author Ida Marie Hede as she reads aloud from her text on the peculiarities of life in the plastic habitat.

During opening hours, visitors are welcome to explore and interact with the installation and to come and go as they please. They are also invited into the dome for a close-up, one-on-one encounter with Hilde and the worms.

The vulnerable relationship between worms, foam plastic and the human being and its slow dissolution is the central point of the work, offering a speculative point of view on our relationship with ourselves and others. It is an invitation to a personal and visually poignant experience of a woman transforming her body, skin and voice in an attempt to co-evolve with a species that potentially has better prospects than she does.

Read Ida Marie Hede’s text here