MATCHING & MESHING (2022)
Matching & Meshing is a spatial installation exploring our dynamic relationship with the sun. The project is situated in the exhibition space of See Lab, The Hague (NL). In collaboration with a transdisciplinary group of performers, artists, and architects, we explored how spatial interventions can deepen a sense of ecological belonging. The final installation is a site-specific spatial choreography of nine wooden frames, each with distinct movement patterns and translucent textures. From dawn to dusk, the sunlight gradually reveals a dynamic landscape of colors and reflections to bring about a heightened awareness of our entangled relationship with the sun.
MATCHING & MESHING
Ecological Belonging
One of the critical aspects of climate change is that our relationship to the earth is changing. While witnessing ecological rhythms detach from their familiar contours, we are becoming self-aware that our actions are influencing global systems. At heart of Spacious’ gentle, sensorial approach to the built environment lies the aspiration to cultivate a subtle spatial intelligence that fosters this sense of reciprocity and ecological belonging. Through our interventions, we seek to strengthen the dynamic connections between people and their environments.
In today’s fast-paced society, it is difficult to align with the rhythms of the Earth. One could speak of a jetlag society in which ecological cycles fall out of sync with the fast and chaotic pace of urban life. The global city reveals beautiful and complex interconnections, a dynamic flow of traffic, goods and people. But the urban experience often remains distant— viewed from skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, and screens. One can argue that this distant view on the world erodes our sense of ecological belonging. But what if spatial intervention could positively contribute to a felt connection?
What if architecture could enhance shared rhythms between us and our environments?
To explore these questions, Spacious initiated a spatial testing ground during an artistic residency at the sunlit exhibition space of See Lab, an artist incubator in The Hague (NL). Over the period of a month, we invited a transdisciplinary group of performers, artists, architects, and researchers into our creative process, aiming to build a collective relationship with the sun by means of spatial intervention.
Matching & Meshing
As with most of our in-situ projects, we began with an in-depth, sensorial, and performative exploration of the exhibition space. In this specific project, we choose to draw on insights from the social sciences, particularly the concept of mutual incorporation. The concept of mutual incorporation explains how social understanding, such as sympathy and empathy, emerge through a subtle and playful process of coordinated bodily actions referred to as matching and meshing. Matching appears as a similarity in bodily actions such as facial expressions, postures, gestures and vocalisations. Meshing appears as a smooth coordination of each other’s action through meaningful reactions. When I reach out to throw a ball, you prepare to catch it. When I cry, you offer a tissue. Like members of a music ensemble finding a shared rhythm, bodies align through this embodied interplay, creating a space where intentionality is shared between self and other. In the creative process, we extended this mechanism of social understanding beyond human interaction to explore how we might match and mesh with the built environment, materials, and even cosmological bodies like the sun. What does it mean to find attunement with rhythms of dusk and dawn, rather than with another person?
We started with simple performative exercises like mirroring each other’s movements. This led to insights about the importance of placement and context. For example, if someone opens a door and I mirror them a meter to the side, the action loses its meaning. Meaningful interaction depends not just on movement and rhythm, but on where and how they are situated. Through this embodied exploration, slowly incorporating materials and the (built) environment itself, we began to sense how matching and meshing with ecological rhythms, like those of the sun, requires more than imitation; it requires full attunement to place, time, and the dynamics of our environment.
INSTALLATION & INSIGHTS
Being Alive to the World
Over the weeks, subtle shifts in our own rhythms emerge as we arrive at the exhibition space at dawn and leave at dusk. Attuned to specific reflections within the space, we feel a hint of sadness when a passing cloud blocks a colourful interference from revealing itself. Nearly 24 hours later, we find ourselves waiting with great anticipation for another chance to attend a performance of the sun.
Also, outside the exhibition space, the relationship with the sun evolves. While taking a break in the garden, we experience an unexpected moment of compassion when the sun gently warms our skin. Triggered by a temperature contrast less noticeable indoors, it feels as if the sun is gently hugging us. The newly formed connection with the sun feels distinct from the empathy or sympathy we experience with friends or family. Instead, kinship and ecological belonging, an awareness that we belong to the Earth and the sun as much as to one another, emerges through a state of (spontaneous) compassion. As Tim Ingold writes in 'Rethinking the Animate', this may be described as “a condition of being alive to the world, characterised by a heightened sensitivity and responsiveness, in perception and action, to an environment that is always in flux.”
Site-Specific Installation
The final installation is a site-specific, spatial choreography composed of nine wooden frames, each with a distinct movement pattern and translucent textures. From dawn to dusk, the sunlight gradually reveals a dynamic landscape of colors and reflections. Rather than evoking a mystic ritual, the performative installation invites a grounded connection with the environment through a simple play of matching and meshing. By repositioning a wooden frame, we give reciprocity spatial form and make it into something we can experience. While dancing with the sun, Matching & Meshing reveals reservoirs of subtle realities that highlight the entangled relationships between inside and outside, between bodies and environments, inviting a deeper awareness of our interconnectedness, nurturing more reciprocal relationships with the sun.
Pliable Architecture
In his book Embodied Time, architect Kevin Nute explains that both our sensing of the world and our bodily manipulation of it make us attuned to the present: ‘Flexible environments [..] not only enable us to alter our surroundings to meet our changing needs but just as importantly also prove us with evidence of our capacity to change the word, to literally ‘make a difference’. It is exactly this experience of agency in the open-present, a possibility for adaptability in the here and now, that Matching & Meshing reveals. The playfulness of the installation enables both sensing and responding to immediate weather patterns. Each day a small gesture, for example a gentle repositioning of the frames, is enough to align the installation with the sunlight. But without this responsiveness, the liveliness of the installation fades away.
Exploring how architecture can foster shared rhythms between people and their environments is not just a call for pliable, adaptable spaces. The collaborative, sensorial, and participatory process behind the work also challenges the traditional image of the architect as a solitary creative genius working behind the drawing table or computer. In contrast to architecture at a distance, Matching & Meshing shows how spatial practitioners can operate in full attunement with their surroundings. If working at a distance hinders alignment with the rhythms of the earth, then this in-situ, enactive mode of practice potentially offers another pathway towards an architecture that enhances ecological belonging.
Reading More
Matching & Meshing is part of a series of testing grounds that explore the way our moving bodies and environments mutually form and extend each other. Further reflections on the project are published in 'Matching & Meshing: Reciprocity as Cement', a contribution to the book Out of Theory: Relational Ecologies of Theory and Practice.
MATCHING & MESHING
Team and Partners
Matching & Meshing is initiated by Spacious with curatorial support by See Lab, and artistic grants by Makersregeling Den Haag and STROOM.
Project lead by Renske Maria van Dam, in collaboration with performance researcher Leon Lapa Pereira, architect Jimmy Stegeman, textile artist and performer Ellen Lili Vanderstraeten, performer Katerina Bakatsaki, spatial design researcher Chris Cottrell, artist Robbi Meertens, mime performer Rachel Schuit, artist Vivien Vuong, graphic designer Saskia Pouwels, artist Jellie Klaster.
Special thanks to Sissel Marie Ton, Lili Berger and Carolien van der Schoot.
Photographs by Spacious.
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