body x necklace x intention = base unit
Jewellery does not exist in a bubble but it acts and is being acted upon in a complex network. In order to make these elements more explicit, I research connections between jewellery and its surrounding, for example the body, and its broader actants, for example societal norms. I am very interested in the body as the place and concept that jewellery relates to and theoretical knowledge on how and why people engage with objects, specifically jewellery.
For the series Memories of Healing, I researched tattooing and scarification traditions that humans created for protection on physical and magical levels. Tattoos, scarifications and brandings create pain in a controlled and ritualised setting without altering body functions. The transformation my necklaces undergo is aggressive, yet resolved to a point that exposes a beauty inherent to the process and to the outcome. This beauty is important to me as it makes the rigorous process more accessible. It is here that one can be reminded of the possibility of healing and growing after a painful experience.
Base Unit takes the transforming powers of jewellery as its starting point. Together with a reading group, I study Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. The philosophers’ understanding of jewellery being a weapon, not necessarily in the literal sense but as an element that disrupts power structures, has influenced my work strongly. The necklaces become protective shields. They are not longer only a memory of an experienced healing in the past but they project into the future. Together with a human body and an intention, a necklace becomes a base unit: a forceful, beautiful Deleuzian warrior who troubles power structures and creates love.
Disclaimer
Quotes appear in italic, my own thoughts in regular font. The quotes are academically incorrect but sufficient to look them up.
ATP=Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. 2013. A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Base Unit: Creature
ATP p.462 The war machine implies the release of a speed vector that becomes a free or independent variable; this does not occur in the hunt, where speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal. The pig is running through the woods, knowing that they are coming for it. They aim their arrows at its running, tired body. When an arrow gets released it can hear its sharp noise, feel how it would feel if the metal entered into its skin. The arrows miss it though, the pig is running fast. The hunters become heated, angry and focused. They release their arrows with care now. And then it happens; an arrow hits it, enters into the pig’s flesh and makes it stop running, stop moving, stop breathing, start bleeding.
Photo: bettinaschwalm.com
Base Unit: Evolution
ATP p.461 The economy of violence is not that of the hunter in the animal raiser, but that of the hunted animal. The hunted animal becomes the raised animal, the raised animal becomes the bred animal, the bred animal becomes the hyper-bred animal, the hyper-bred animal becomes the genetically modified animal, the genetically modified animal becomes the cyborg-human-flesh.
Photo: bettinaschwalm.com
Base Unit: Gist
ATP p.466 Learning to undo things, and to undo oneself, is proper to the war machine: the "not-doing" of the warrior, the undoing of the subject. To undo oneself. I undo myself. I find the button, press klick and I am undone. Lose, partial, unconnected, unseen, un-anything. In the state of floating, of everything and nothing. I am undone. Nothing is there to tell me to re-do myself. No weapon or tool can manage. No state of war and piece makes a difference. I am forever undone.
Photo: bettinaschwalm.com
Base Unit: Speed
ATP p.460 As a first approximation, weapons have a privileged relation with projection. Anything that throws or is thrown is fundamentally a weapon, and propulsion is its essential moment. The more mechanisms of projection a tool has, the more it behaves like a weapon. In addition, tools are constantly compensating for the projective mechanisms they possess. One could also say that the tool encounters resistances, to be conquered or put to use, while the weapon has to do with counterattack, to be avoided or invented. Weapons and tools do not tendentially (approximately) have the same relation to movement, to speed. The weapon invents speed, or the discovery of speed invents the weapon (the projective character of weapons is the result). What is the speed of a necklace? It does not physically project or build something but it moves on and with the body. What ist the counterattack of the necklace? What is the violence of a necklace? My necklaces underwent some violence when someone chopped down a living tree and then I cut and burned the wooden chunks. They also experienced love and attention when I tattooed them, oiled them, and worked with them for months to decide on where and how to interfere.
Base Unit: Object
ATP p.460 A distinction can always be made between weapons and tools on the basis of their usage (destroying people or producing goods). What object then creates people and destroys goods? Objects can assemble identity, give existence. Particularly jewellery produces identity, gender, status, so maybe it also creates people? On the other hand, I can’t take objects with me when I die, instead they continue to live on. What happens when I destroy all my objects before I die? Will someone still remember me? Will I annihilate myself? Is that actually possible? To be forgotten is the great fear of death. I create objects to mark my territory on this earth. Does the object in return create me? I think so. Making an object, a necklace, is not a one way street. I am closely communicating with the object. I create with an open heart, I am vulnerable in the process and there are many entry points for the object to enter my existence. At the other end of this process, when I wear a necklace, I let it sit on my body, I let other people see it, I let it represent me, it communicates to my environment, it acts and gives.
Photo: bettinaschwalm.com