S.O.S. Space Ontology Station

S.OS. rethinks space as a living organism, it is a poetic and symbolic exercise that proposes the illness of the space as a metaphor, revealing the spatial malfunctions and disabilities, its failing organs and metabolism. S.O.S is a semiotic analysis that transposes our understanding of physical illness to ‘illness’ as a property of space: as the visible outcome of the invisible symptoms the spatial organism, partly through human interference, carries within it.
Symptoms such as ‘damaged’, ‘abandoned’, ‘broken’, ‘bruised’, ‘wounded’, ‘forgotten’, are diagnosed through actions and interventions that make the metaphor visible, the moment meaning is produced out of the ordinary. In order to re-write the physical damage of the patient/space, the healing process uses concepts of topography and space surgery.
This research relates the singularity and weakness of humanity to the complex layering of nature’s politics and the impact of human interference within natural processes. It reveals the cataclysm of nature and its natural resistance against humanity. Using the reference of the cordyceps (a kind of mushroom) as organisms that invade, alter and affect the behavior of the host, this station is a research-in-progress: an animist approach to reading the traces of life in the space.

Credits

APASS final presentation, De Singel 2012
Sound composed by Simon Williams
Costume design: Tom Van der Borght
Collaboration Wouter Decorte