Márton Kabai

Skinning looks at the skin as a subject through the story of a mink farmer who has been skinning mink his entire life. It asks how his skin, the most extensive human organ, can record the suffering, the pain, the hard work, has the capacity of empathy, and later becomes an archive that holds memories and traces that can confront him and teach him during his mental breakdown. The story has been written as a musical composition for two performers. We have produced an extensive archive of drone footage of 12 different abandoned Dutch mink farms to speculate on the spatiality of the vanishing of the mink farm industry. How the farm as a wound on the skin of the Earth should be preserved as a monument to remember what once existed and how we learn from that.

How do we turn two vibrating strings that can make and unmake worlds into a concern of the Anthropocene? How can we remind people that our bio-physical instrument that makes the human voice possible is as fragile and exposed as our planet? How has the human language fixated on representation and abstraction and forgotten its biological roots in favor of the virtual and metaphysical? How can the focus on the vocal cords be a reminder of the chasm between matter and meaning, body and mind? How do we accept the ethical contradiction between the signified and the signifier? How the wound, the chasm, and the separation between nature and culture can be represented through the exposure of the vocal cord? We have been busy responding to these questions for the last two months with our new work: I have always been with you, a ceramic sonic sculpture pair. The artwork's physicality was a significant conceptual aspect, so we materialized it in space instead of remaining on-screen with CG methods. (This is the first time we sculpted with clay and experimented with glazing. It also made us in contact with the matter that matters and taught us constantly in a bodily manner.)

How do we turn two vibrating strings that can make and unmake worlds into a concern of the Anthropocene? How can we remind people that our bio-physical instrument that makes the human voice possible is as fragile and exposed as our planet? How has the human language fixated on representation and abstraction and forgotten its biological roots in favor of the virtual and metaphysical? How can the focus on the vocal cords be a reminder of the chasm between matter and meaning, body and mind? How do we accept the ethical contradiction between the signified and the signifier? How the wound, the chasm, and the separation between nature and culture can be represented through the exposure of the vocal cord? We have been busy responding to these questions for the last two months with our new work: I have always been with you, a ceramic sonic sculpture pair. The artwork's physicality was a significant conceptual aspect, so we materialized it in space instead of remaining on-screen with CG methods. (This is the first time we sculpted with clay and experimented with glazing. It also made us in contact with the matter that matters and taught us constantly in a bodily manner.)

Commission by Mari Mako

Commissioned by Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik

How can gaming the end of Dutch mink farming help us shape the spaces that are left behind? On August 28th 2020, the Dutch government expedited a ban on mink fur farming from 2024 to March 2021. The ban was accelerated not because of changes in consumer desires or changes in societal ethics, but as a direct consequence of the coronavirus detected in mink. The rapid pace of infections among mink and the transmission to humans lead Minister Schouten to order an immediate culling of 2.4 million minks from 120 mink fur farms. The cabinet reserved 150 millions euros to help mink fur farmers, a compensation based on how many mother minks each farm owned. It remains uncertain what will happen to the abandoned former mink farms. During US: Shaping Time, Oddkin will speculate on different scenarios for spaces of abandoned former mink farms in the form of a scripted game. Post-Mink: Farm or Non-Farm will highlight how these empty former mink farms can become intensive spaces for a radically egalitarian, caring society, or remain exploited by commercial, profit oriented interests. Through the interactive live role play of a speculative mink farmer, with the help of the online audience, Oddkin will confront us with the ethical dilemma of how a series of individual decisions could invoke a collective planetary change.

Commission by Mari Mako

snapshot

performance

Commissioned by Tu-Delft & AMS Institute

Today’s Success Is Tomorrow’s Disaster is a board game that portrays a future scenario for the animal agriculture industry. Players learn about the cost of financial success, by being confronted with the possible moral and climatologic consequences of endless growth. Two capitalist players — an agriculture minister and a farm owner — strive to improve and maintain the economic growth of the livestock sector, while two activists — an animal rights activist and an environmental activist — endeavor to sabotage them by revealing evidence of their limitless capitalist exploitation