Rivers that are granted 'human rights'. The legal battle over the authorship rights of a monkey. A robot judge presiding over legal cases. With the multi-annual program De Dingen Stroom attempts to address the changing status of ‘things' and the implications this has on human life.

Why Should Our Bodies end at the Skin?

Your body is an organised pile of muscles and bones, your body is a citizen, your body is a protestor, your body is a place of violent acts, of loving acts, your body is online, measured, analysed, felt, technological, a partly nonhuman body.

'Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?', taken from Donna Haraway’s 1990 Cyborg Manifesto, proposes to extend our categorisation of things by imploding our bodies. It features performances and screenings which look to specific objects and object histories to challenge ideas on sustainability, beauty, (trans)femininity, the natural, and the categorisation of the human.

Marjanne Helvert & Pauline Agustoni
Once Created, Never Destroyed
Could there be such a thing as material rights? As humans, animals, and some natural entities are in the process of gaining legal rights, should human-made objects be granted rights as well? We might grant rights to the forest and the tree, but when we decide to build a chair out of that tree, we need to extend those same rights to that chair. Once Created, Never Destroyed proposes a responsibility for all things once created; for to waste an object is to destroy ourselves.

Rowan Wigley
Heresy of Champna (2016)
This surreal satire of a typical shampoo advert aims to reveal controversies within the beauty industry by using absurd analogies and metaphors that influence the characters, film design and visual symbolism within the imagined world of Heresy of Champna.
www.rowanwigley.com

Vectors
Contact Zone
An audiovisual performative design piece divided into 3 parts, where humans, non-human-made nature, and technology communicate with each other. Artificial intelligence counts with a different time than the climate, capital, the Moon, a road-bump, a starfish, a rock, slime pod, squid, atomic weapons, bacteria, genomes, carbon, and homo sapiens.

rkss & Swan Meat
Queer Plastic
A synthetic and intimate object, the Barbie Doll, as a starting point to explore the interlocked polymers of immaterial and material agents. Barbie, made from oil from Saudi Arabia, embodies a kind of toxic cis femininity and oil. rkss and Swan Meat look for new worlds out of this swath of plastic polymers.