Gosie Vervloessem

Monsters Assembly is a collective that is convened by wpZimmer. It is initiated by Helga Baert and Gosie Vervloessem (wpZimmer) and is guided through the artistic practices of Leonardo Delogu and Carolina Mendonça. Monsters School is a collective work authored by Monsters Assembly: Leonardo Delogu (artist), Carolina Mendonça (artist), Gosie Vervloessem (artist-curator), Dušica Dražić (artistic advisor), Alex Schuurbiers (community worker) and 8 participants Prisca-Agnes Nishimwe, Laurent Delom de Mézerac, Joud Toamah, Lois Loumonga Brochez, Elien Verschueren, Kaori Ishiguro, Denys Shantar and Miles Fischler.

Monsters School (2024, Middelheim, part of Come Closer expo) is a collective and durational experiment, a performative transformation of “school” into a space of co-creation. This process of becoming other is a practice of unlearning and undoing while being many. Therefore we sustain a space of studying and practicing together, sharing knowledge and experiences. The process of undoing that we envision is not a process of healing but in the first place a process of co-creation that is rooted in vulnerability, but equally pleasure. We seek in the pleasure of undoing (rather than doing), a sensuality that is rooted in the body and the senses. The school studies and experiments with what monstrosity could be – a monster has blurry borders, is excessive, hypersensitive – an incoherent assemblage. During Monsters School we are empowered through becoming a living monstrosity. As monsters we show something that is not easy or comfortable to see or perceive. We speculate with different narratives and experiment with tools and formats that explore and enhance the monstrosity in ourselves by becoming more attuned to and challenging the world we inhabit. We see this exploration as necessary for survival and creating livable worlds.

The curriculum deals with exploring and expanding our sensitivity and modes of perception. How can we sharpen our perception? Is it possible to create different eyes, ears, senses?

It is a space where we will attempt to cultivate practices of collective sensing that favours opacity to clarity, multiplicity to homogeneity, dissonance to consonance. 

Monsters School is an exercise in looking at schools as more than institutions. We look at them as ‘gatherings/assemblies’ that make ‘free time’, a time for getting lost, being bored, making mistakes, a time of study, exercise and experiment. It is an experimental school that deals with the performatic potential of study.

Monsters School is a monstrous body, that challenges power relations. The roles of a scholar and a participant are fluid, and assigned only temporarily. Therefore the school is itself a monstrous being that challenges the power relations between all the beings that are part of it by suspending productivity. When suspension occurs, the roles that come with the concept of ‘school’ no longer apply.

https://blog.middelheimmuseum.be/nl/artikelen/monsters-dagen-de-school-uit

interview : https://blog.middelheimmuseum.be/nl/artikelen/pleasure-garden

video documentation : see below this page

The Pleasure Garden is a digital artwork in the framework of the Middelheim Museum’s Artistic Research Project ‘Reading the landscape’.  The Pleasure Garden is a research project that explores the Middelheim Museum as a platform for encounters between different human and more-than-human agents.  Powerful stories about interweaving exuding pleasure, but equally turbulence emerged. The Pleasure Garden challenges the dominant voices in the park and creates spaces for those agents that are mostly unheard, picturing their vast intertwinings.

The Pleasure Garden is an AR application that guides you through 5 locations in the Middelheim park. AR, Reality Augmented by things we do not see or hear, feel or sense in the first place, at first glance, when we are blinded by the dominant stories in the park. It enables you to see and sense things we do not perceive if we do not pay special attention. Ar technology is used as an attention device. It is a tool that scans the borders between reality and fiction and helps to write and read complex stories and release erotic energies. The app can be triggered in the park and on a map/poster. 

The content of The Pleasure Garden was inspired by a reading group on queer ecology. For this reading group, a Pleasure Garden Reader assembled texts on queer ecology.

 

The Launch of the Pleasure Garden

 
Next to the app which could be downloaded in the park, The Pleasure Garden was also a publication. Through this publication, The Pleasure Garden could be experienced at home.

About the publication, accompanying The Pleasure Garden

The map – The Pleasure Garden is an Augmented Reality application that can be downloaded at the Middelheim Museum. After a tour in the park with the app, the public can take a map with them, to experience The Pleasure Garden at home. At the back of the publication you find a print of The Horror Garden. By scanning the qr-codes you can hear The Horror Garden audio-files.

The bookmarks and letter to the reader – During The Pleasure Garden presentation, the public could buy 5 books in the bookshop of Middelheim, that were a huge inspiration for The Pleasure Garden. When you bought one of these books, you received a letter to the reader and a bookmark that revealed a score to read the book you just bought at the bookshop.

The map

 

 

The Bookmarks 

 

 

 

 

 

Video documentation 

 

Credits : 

• Concept – Gosie Vervloessem
• Drawings – Gosie Vervloessem
• Poster Design – Joud Toamah
• Print and Print Advice  – Gerard Leysen/Affreux
• AR design and Development : Oscar Tulkens
• AR tech supervisor : Laurent Delom
• Sound Recording, Composition and Editing – David Elchardus
• Photography – Navid Fayez
• Outside eye – Einat Tuchman, Helga Duchamps, Sille Belloul
• Curator – Pieter Boons

Format : AR guided tour on site and publication, Support : Middelheim Museum, Production : Middelheim Museum and WpZimmer

 

• The Horror Garden (2018)

 

To understand the true nature of Brussels (2022), I created  a botanological map of the magical pentagon as a tool for my research. A botanological map is a map that explores the intimate relationships between Homo sapiens and the vegetal kingdom. On the map (presented on the floor in a space) I take people on a guided tour. The group wanders from Heysel over Grand Place and Matonge, …. to end in Parc Astrid in Anderlecht (on the map in the space). In each of these places, the group focuses on a particular plant that is strongly connected to that place. We scrutinize that plant and its properties; mainly to understand how the plant can inspire us to tell stories about that place. More general :  how can plants open and hold a platform for conversation? How can we help them to unleash their inherent speculative energies to envision new worlds?  Therefore, the guided tour involves a few pic-nics;  we taste and digest Brussels together.  During the tour, Brussels gets plowed, a landscape of emotions surfaces and reveals the true nature of the swamp city.

 

Time : 1h

Format: lecture performance

Production: WpZimmer

• The Horror Garden (2018)

Around the same time the precursors of Carl Linnaeus (Lobelius, Clusius, Dodoens – whose books were all printed by Christoffel Plantijn) started their dubious classification of the natural world, radical botany got born. It is a genre of fiction in which the speculative energy of plants to imagine new worlds gets fully unleashed. The genre tackles important issues about ‘agency’ revolving around the question: ‘How to re-think agency outside of the notions of desire, exploitation and power, outside the animal logic?’ This lecture focusses on tendrilesque writing. What happens to human speech if vines enter our flesh, roots crawl through our veins, and we turn into hybrid plant monsters? What happens if we let plants speak through us and what kind of new language, new bits of knowledge and new worlds can emerge from there? This lecture will explore these topics while focusing on the status of women, and their relation to plants, as presented in works of fiction in which the distinction between women and plants becomes blurry.

recording : https://kaaitheater.be/en/articles/gosie-vervloessem-invites-natania-meeker-antonia-szabari-gry-ulstein-others-radical-botany

 

facemasks can be used via my instagram account https://www.instagram.com/_____gosievervloessem______/

 

 

is an online publication of excerpts of my diary written between May 2019 and September 2020. It revolves around The Sick Detective. Alas the heart is not a plant focuses on my struggle performing The Sick Detective as a hybrid vegetal character during Corona-lockdown. The text was first presented as a lecture-performance at pApBerlin.

www.grandreunion.net/alas-the-heart-is-not-a-plant

format: online publication

Support: Flemish Authorities

Production: WpZimmer

 

 

 is a zine that introduces the character of The Sick Detective, an alter ego that I use during my artistic research. The main trait of The Sick Detective is her ongoing struggle with notions as immersion, osmosis, co-penetration, infection, etc. By embodying this character I reflect on the position of the artistic researcher in times of crises and the problems that are induced by it. The character of The Sick Detective is based on plant-human hybrids depicted in popular culture. It draws inspiration from philosophical works from Stacy Alaimo, Nicole Seymour, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Heather Houser, etc. The zine is used during talks, workshops and lectures.

 

 

 

is a collage and a booklet. It is the result of an investigation about the relation between humankind and plants, inspired by Bruegel’s painting ‘Landscape, with the fall of Icarus’. The painting represents Icarus fall into the sea, set against the background of an idyllic landscape. Brueghel’s painting depicts the fragility of humankind and the risk that lies in dealing with uncontrolled forces. They could not care less reflects on questions inspired by Bruegel’s painting, such as: Is this landscape with its vibrant sun, its waves and its vigorous plants only a silent witness to icarus’ sinking? Is nature only a backdrop to human existence or is there more at play? The booklet that is presented next to the collage, contains several quotes and images that, departing from Bruegel’s landscape with the fall of Icarus, helps to shed light on our relation to plants, their boundless growth, their seemingly rampant blind force and the recognition of the limitations and precariousness of the human condition. The collection of different quotes and images are inspired by the defining elements on Bruegel’s painting: sea, island, tendrils, crops, grass, sun, wind and trees. After the fall of man, plants will re-claim their territory. And whether we are falling or not, they could not care less.

Format: Collage, booklet
Support: Flemish Authorities
Production: CCStrombeek

We Need Monsters to Think Monsters (2018-ongoing) is a series of documentary photographs and drawings made by The Sick Detective, an alter ego I use for my artistic research. By close observation and study of The Swamp Thing, who serves as an inspiration for The Sick Detective, The Sick Detective explores her being.

Format: photographs, drawings
Support: Flemish Authorities
Production: WpZimmer

 

is an investigative performance and/or installation about the relationship between humans and plants, which questions a number of important issues : Can the relationship between people and plants transcend the unlimited mutual exploitation? What can we learn about ourselves if we consider plants as the significant order and what kind of horror can this lead to? What happens when plants break out of the background of our living rooms? When searching for an answer to these questions, I call on a number of horror movies in which plants frighten us. Sometimes they attack us head-on, but often the horror lies in ominously waving branches and rustling bushes. Colonization runs like a red thread through the story: colonization of territory by humans and plants, colonization of organisms, bodies and spirits… The work spans 3 different locations where the human-vegetal relation comes to a climax, where the relation between humans and plants takes a stark form: the nature reserve, the plantation and the botanical garden. Places with a direct link to a colonial past. Places in which the relationship between people and plants seems tightly aligned. At least it seems.

The Horror Garden was acquired by the Middelheim Museum and became part of the Middelheim Collection in 2022 in the form of an installation and in a poster format.

Concept and development – Gosie Vervloessem, Dramaturgy – Einat Tuchman, Sound recording and editing – David Elchardus, Poster design – Joud Toamah, Print and print advice  – Gerard Leysen/Affreux

Time: 45’ — chapter 1 / 90’ — three chapters
Format: Lecture-performance, installation and poster
Support: Vlaamse gemeenschap, Middelheim Museum
Production: CCStrombeek, De School Van Gaasbeek, WpZimmer

Part of the Middelheim Museum collection since 2023

• The Pleasure Garden (2022-2023)

is a video installation based on a series of texts about my research on invasive species. in the video installation, i tell stories about my fascination about my favorite invasive species, the Japanese knotweed. During my search for stories, I met interesting people: Jo from Knotweed Control in Swansea lead me around the capital of Japanese knotweed Swansea; I worked with Sasha, the head of eradication business in Chur; I got lost with Gusti, a forest ranger in Iceland; I encountered homeless people living in a knotweedbush in Brussels; had long conversations with Denis from the Botanical Garden in Meise. These encounters constantly changed my vision of this tenacious exote – moreover, my vision of invasive species in general. What can be labeled as nature and what not? The fierce reactions that the Japanese knotweed unleashes, raise at the same time questions about categorization, mobility, migration, colonialism, horror and the secret power of plants.

Format: installation
Support: Flemish Authorities
Production: wpZimmer

 is a lecture-performance about the Japanese Knotweed, an  invasive species well known in Europe. The story of this plant is the starting point for a cooking session and at the same time a moment to reflect on the theme of migration in a quasi-scientific, poetic-absurd way.

Time : 45’
Format : lecture performance
Support: VG
Production : workspacebrussels and WpZimmer

is a bread-baking workshop wherein I focus on storytelling, fortunetelling, magic and how linking and re-thinking these elements might help us to digest and transform the world. It invites people in a reflection on new ways of storytelling and focuses on creating narratives as spells or divinations to shape the future of the world we are living in. During the workshop we conjure monsters that lay dormant under the ground, under our skin and baking in the oven to assist us during this process. In the end we share bread, and by doing so ingest the spells we made during the workshop.

Time: 4h
Format: workshop
Support: VG, Matera Cultural Capital of Europe (2019)
Production: WpZimmer
Dramaturgy: Chiara Organtini

 

is a one-on-one workshop and a poster that focuses on co-digestion as a way for cruising complexity. Deep Space Navigation invites people to participate in a process of shared digestion as a tool to better understand the complexity of the world in which we currently live. By interlacing digestive practices, the workshop attempts to re-imagining planet Earth. The poster contains a transcription of a collective brainstorm session about co-digestion with a biologist and a recipe/manual
for making co-digestion real.

Format: Workshop, one on one
Support: Flemish Authorities
Production: workspacebrussels and WpZimmer