Els van Houtert | Artist & Anthropologist
Artist & Anthropologist
Els van Houtert | Artist & Anthropologist
Artist & Anthropologist
Installation, 2019 – An attempt to rediscover anthropological fieldwork materials and to establish a new, refreshed relationship with the once-lived.
Rooted in my experiences as an anthropologist of religion lies my fascination with dynamic object/subject relationships and other-than-human-personhoods. In my ethnographic research, I explore how things can be alive through their relationships with human beings, and why this is important. Doing so, I aim to look beyond life as people tell or imagine it, finding my (bumpy) way through the chaos of everyday life-as-lived.
In “there is an inspiration about It..,” I try to take my relation to my fieldwork material as a next subject of anthropological inquiry. I seek to capture what is absent and to make it tangible, and I wonder: Is the life of things fix? Can it be fluid? Does It die once neglected? And, eventually, can the thing become my informant?
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