GRADUATION SPECIAL : Ruben Baart
Hyperhidrosis
The Body Mist Healing Salon is a corporeal fiction placed within a medical facility to reconceptualize the existing conditions of pharmaceutical programming. Under these conditions, the sexual body is perceived as a malleable apparatus, and can be adjusted to biocapitalist ends.
The salon is a rationalization that seeks to undermine these current strategies by arousing bodily secretions, generated by a closed, controlled atmosphere. Airborne compounds transmit signals regarding the subjects’ sexual orientation and genetic makeup, while simultaneously disrupting prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature.
The installation functions as a mystic database to which the subject commits their perspiration to harmonize with previous and following visitors: A rejuvenation of sorts to establish a collective being.
Ruben Baart, Visual Strategy at Sandberg Instituut