MATCHING & MESHING (2022) is the result of an artist in residency at artist incubator See Lab in The Hague, the Netherlands. This spatial installation is activated by the movement of the sun.

 

The social sciences teach us that social understanding (empathy and sympathy) emerges in a process of coordinated actions between moving bodies. This process is referred to as mutual incorporation, and is revealed through matching and meshing. Matching appears as a similarity in bodily actions, such as facial expressions, postures, gestures and vocalizations, that provide an opportunity to live the bodily intentionality of the other by going through the same actions. Meshing appears as a smooth coordination of each other’s action through meaningful reactions. When you reach out to present a gift, the other reaches out to receive.

 

In this project, I studied if and how we can transfer these mechanisms of social understanding to the built environment. In a collaborative process for which I invited a transdisciplinary group of performers, artist and architects we worked around the question: Can architecture activate mutual incorporation between our moving bodies and the movements of the sun?”