SOFT ROC by Tom et Arthur

About

“It is high time to retire the concepts active and passive as we commonly think them, and time to start rocking.” 1 

Soft Roc is a malleable environment created by artist duo Tom et Arthur that proposes agitation and troublemaking as a way to disrupt the rigid categories of active and passive.

For their first project in London, Tom et Arthur invade KELDER’s architectural tropes with a collection of orthostatic shades that turn the previously stable and solid structure into an elastic and fuzzy layout. Stretching from a dolmen to a padded cell, Soft Roc produces the conditions for things to be cloudy, confused and violently shaken.

Expanding upon Timothy Morton’s philosophical concept of rocking and his call for the abandonment of anthropocentrism, the environment of Soft Roc is simultaneously in action and standby: vibrating, oscillating, rocking, and rolling. These movements are further amplified by collaborations between Tom et Arthur and Fay Nicolson, Linda Stupart, and other performing bodies. Acting as continuous agitations, these performances will occur throughout the duration of the project at KELDER.

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Tom et Arthur is a collaborative practice that encompasses the field of design and art. Formed by Tom Schneider and Arthur Tramier, they create deep deep domestic layouts – applied and fantastic situations through counter-correct objects, spaces, and dirty intuitions. Since their graduation from the Dirty Art Department at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam NL, their work has been exhibited in Galleries (as part of ‘Rare Collisions of Purpose’, Boetzelaer|Nispen, NL; Deborah Bowmann, BE), Squats (PostNorma, NL; Macao, IT) and Bubbles (Sloterdijk, NL).

KELDER is a curatorial project space acting as a collision point for interdisciplinary practice and collaboration.

1 Morton, Timothy. Humankind: solidarity with nonhuman people. Verso, London, New York, 2017, p180