New Viewings: Alex Schweder

How Does Your Inside Become My Inside?

2020, 00:00:58, Digital Animation

Pursing and pouting, animated by currents, inflatable spaces offer a recognition approximating my sense of flesh … my desire for other peoples’… the foreignness of my own… the meanings stuffed into it… the seduction of its stink. Tossed in the roiling of inflatable space,

alone,

I press against other occupants… my own subjectivities, previously without permission, without possibility, the suppler of my selves… drinkers of the milk I yearn to leak… tiny drops sweating through my shirt… expanding in a stereo broadcast of my longing to nourish … lacteal masculinity leaking out.

-Alex Schweder, from

“Architects After Architecture”, Routledge, 2020

For over a decade Alex Schweder (born 1970, New York City) has used the term ‘performance architecture’ to describe the creative practice in which he uses buildings as media to ask questions about who we become through our actions in relation to them. His works along these lines have been collected and exhibited internationally including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Performa 17, and the Tate Britain. Recently Schweder has been exploring inflatables as instruments to simultaneously create sound and space in collaboration with sound artist Mieko Suzuki for the 2020 A L’ARME! Festival with The Breath Before. In the fall of 2021 this auditory direction will be furthered at the invitation of Carrie Mae Weems as part of her ground breaking presentation of ideas at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.

Special thanks to Oscar Maguire for making it possible to think through animations.