TAT ARA
TAT ARA (Barcelona)
TAT ARA is gallery space that gives visibility to and connects projects across art, design, and ecology. It hosts critical, experimental, and research-based practices. It is a space sheltered from the system, a place to connect, generate friction, and build networks among people, communities, and practices. A cultural space open to the public for exhibitions, production, reading, debate, listening, conversation, and research.
Proposal
Our posthuman bodies in hybrid worlds seek ecological clarity within a reality increasingly alienated from earth, mud, worms and bacteria. Materiality no longer guarantees the real. Gathering Grounds is an artistic research project by Guus Vandeweerd based on a virtual environment. It explores other ways of inhabiting the planet, creating new relationships with the more-than-human and recovering ancestral ways of bonding and relating. Situated ecological knowledge is translated through plants, rocks and relational objects from Flanders, Belgium. Can a virtual, pixelated cartography transfer situated knowledge and create a rhizomatic landscape capable of generating other realities through a non-colonial ecological gaze?
Guus Vandeweerd is a design researcher based in Brussels. He is currently pursuing a PhD at PXL-MAD School of Arts and Hasselt University. His research focuses on more-than-human avatars and the hybridity between physical and virtual environments.
Games are the central medium of his interdisciplinary practice. Although his work often takes shape outside the game itself, it remains connected to game design and virtual worlding. Speculation is central to how he develops this relationship.
His work has been presented at iMAL in Brussels and London College of Fashion. It has also been shown at FRAME in Hasselt. His writing has appeared in Collateral and the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media.
