solo exhibition
DIALECT, 2024
RADIUS – Center for Art and Ecology, Delft (NL)
14 September 2024 – 23 February 2025
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Femke Herregraven’s work explores which material base, geographies, and value systems are carved out by financial technologies and infrastructures. Focusing on the effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, historiography, and individual lives, her research is the basis for the conception of speculative characters, stories, objects, sculptures, sound, and mixed-media installations.
Over the past decade, she has focused on financial, geological, and climatological self-organizing systems that both shape and disrupt daily life. A recurring theme in her work is the financialization of the future as crisis, which she examines through catastrophe bonds as a set of potential distributions of risk and catastrophe. Her work employs multiple textual, computational, and gestural languages, expressed through image, sound, drawing, and speculative fiction, to reflect on how these contemporary future models shape the experience of reality and the very ground on which it stands.
Her interest in finance stems from the fact that finance and art started operating in similar ways in the late 1960s/early 1970s. During that time, the dematerialisation of money, gradually untethered to gold reserves, coincided with the dematerialisation of the art object, through new artistic practices of conceptual art. The return of language in her work comes from the premise that language itself is increasingly shaped by the dynamics of capital and technology rather than by the dynamics of imagination.
Femke Herregraven transforms RADIUS into a site for language re-signification that is reciprocally informed by the local ecology in which it exists, hence vocalising its own dialect. Empowering semiotic agency against an increasingly unstable future, DIALECT emphasises the ecological embeddedness of language and mobilises its polyphonic potential to be able to wish for and shape futures beyond capitalism.
DIALECT (2024)
The solo exhibition DIALECT is a site-specific proposition and live vocalization training experiment. It blurs boundaries between the inside and outside environment of the exhibition space, between foreground and background, between art and infrastructure. The works emerge organically from RADIUS’ local site, creating a porous, interconnected space where vocalization, language, noise, and ecosystems interact. Thematically, DIALECT departs from the premise that language is increasingly shaped by capital and technology rather than imagination.
Central to the exhibition is Elaine, an evolving voice model trained with utterances occurring before, in between, or after speech. In DIALECT, Elaine emphasizes the transcorporeal nature of voice—how it is shaped both by the body and its surrounding environment. During the exhibition, Elaine is trained with local sound and data from RADIUS environment and its vocal output dynamically responds to conditions, such as weather, birds, or exhaust from the nearby chemical plant. As Elaine’s voice shapes and is being shaped by its ecological surroundings, it highlights the material and ecological foundations of language.
The other protagonist in DIALECT is a digital twin of RADIUS. This live simulation, projected on the inner walls, merges RADIUS’ technological past as water reservoir, its present as art centre, and its speculative future as swamp. The digital twin connects inside and outside, reality and fiction, physical matter and digital code, and features dynamic local entities such as microbes, algae, trees, birds, water, crickets, gases, and infrastructural fragments. The evolution of the digital twin is, as Elaine, shaped by fluctuating external conditions in sound, light, air, soil, and water. The simulation is a live, open-ended system and mirrors Elaine’s vocalizations and the exhibition itself, where the boundaries between training and being trained, art and environment, and physical and simulated continuously blur.
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Voice: Elaine v2.2.2410
Elaine AI modeling: Gabor Szalatnyai
Sound: BJ Nilsen
3D and game engine development: Mathieu de Bissonnette, Guillaume Roux, and Max Fauber
On-site production: RADIUS technical team
This solo exhibition marks the last chapter of Femke Herregraven’s Creator Doctus trajectory at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie/Sandberg Instituut. DIALECT has been made possible with additional support from: Creative Industries Fund NL, NLFONDS21, and the Mondriaan Fund.