Thoughts, Work, Collections by Bettina Schwalm

I don’t know about you but I feel my insides pressing against my skin as I read yet another devastating newsflash.
We’re fucked.
The environment, people, politics. Is any of this even salvageable?
On other days, it isn’t despair, just a weirdness.
A glitch, a dissonance of sorts.

Like someone has quietly rearranged my living room without telling me. Something is off. Not fully, just slightly. And I can’t return to the before, because I’ve forgotten how it was, how it felt. Who I was.

So I’ll stay with it. This new thing. This after.
This weirdness.
Maybe that is where it all begins.

Starts hiding behind my eyelids, washing over my perspective.
Blink havoc. Blink pleasure. Blink distraction.
Blink extreme. Blink lost. Blink empty. Blink alive.
Blink all of the above.

Remember after the dentist, when I kissed you with a numb lip, and it felt weirdly sexual.
Was that me, or was that just weird?

And the other day, when we saw a seagull devour a rat.
We read it as end-times symbolism.
Plagues of frogs, rivers of blood… the gull shall eat the rat.

Contents

Background

Weird enough for you? How weird are things going to get?

This question sits at the core of a long-term artistic research project investigating the power of weirding: the accelerating sense that social, technological, ecological, and cultural systems are slipping out of the familiar and into the strange. Rather than treating this as noise, crisis, or something to be smoothed over, the research asks a different question:

Can weirdness be used as a method?
Can we out-weird the weird?

After wrestling with this condition for some time, the project chooses not resistance or retreat, but engagement. What emerges is a committed, critical, and playful relationship with weirdness, one that treats it as both a signal and a material.

As we enter what I describe as an Age of Global Weirding, this research proposes that our most generative response may be to work with uncertainty rather than against it: to stay with confusion long enough for new imaginaries, practices, and orientations to form.

The Lab becomes a site for this work.
A space for exploration, excess, joy, and doom.
For thinking through making.
For failure, unlearning, and rethinking what counts as knowledge.

Here, we linger at the productive edge of being lost, long enough to feel otherwise, and to imagine differently.

Not cautiously.
Not half-arsed.

But joyfully,
adventurously,
all in.

Project info