Day 4: Uncrafting Worth | Final Performance by Andrea van der Kuil

Welcome to this space.

I am a body.

I am a body amongst bodies.

I am a crafting body before you.

I am a body crafting with you,

And together, I hope that we may reach opacity.

Uncrafting Worth is a durational and nomadic artistic research investigation regarding the worth of the female crafter’s body, the craft object she produces, and her crafting process. There has rarely been a time where one’s gender, sex, race, ability, sexuality, and class has not had an impact on one’s placement in the world. Women, and those identifying as female, have long been subjected to the invisible domestic space to perform women’s work, or paraded in the visible space as sexualised objects; placements deeply interwoven with a prescribed worth.

Edouard Glissant’s term ‘opacity’ examines worth by understanding another through difference. Opacity does not see through bodies by reducing them to personal definitions and understandings, but accepts the multiple unknowabilities of the other and the self.

Today, yesterday and tomorrow, I invite you to see the opaque body before you, to see your own opaque body, and to see the opacity of all bodies around you. Uncrafting Worth seeks to embody the indescribable details of opacity, thereby questioning and forming new ways of assigning worth. I invite you to join me in this endeavour.

Supervisor: Fenia Kotsopoulou

External Mentor: Casey Jenkins Sh

Thank you to Kadri Sirel for her presence as my invigilator, and to Zuzanna Sosnowska for the additional documentation.