Season 3: Episode 4

Visual Artist and Author Jennifer Bennett talks about boundaries and otherness.

This season I am talking to artists and thinker about the art of listening.

Jennifer Bennett works with clay, photography, performance and words. I met Jennifer at a reading of her book, SAVE, which is a genre breaking book that documents her travels from Paris to Copenhagen, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and the US as she examined the ideas of boundaries, otherness, the ways society organizes itself, be it focusing on inclusion or exclusion. Jennifer’s look at boundaries was both personal and prescient as today, ten years after her journey started and 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall there are more walls across national borders than during the cold war.

Our conversation touches on the beauty of diversity, the impact of privilege in the ability to become an artist, the care economy and how the pandemic is again highlighting our inability to hold space for different sets of beliefs.

I started in 2010 and I continued in 2014. And first of all the world was a different place then. And secondly, I think I was – because I was never organized I had this kind of naivity and how I approached things. But that also made it possible that the people I interviewed, they could speak. It’s not me knowing solutions. I’m more, maybe like a child going out there and asking questions. And always with the sense that I can at least collect what people have. What they can share.

– Jennifer Bennett

Listen Here

Jennifer Bennett, was born in 1976 in Schaffhausen / Switzerland and currently lives in Germany. She pursues a conceptual practice in the field of visual art, performance, music and text. Her art deals with questions of balance, the connection between art and life and the dissolution of boundaries. The personal and the handling of different materials play an important role in her work. In 2009, with the help of artist friends, she exhibited her birthday at the Golden Pudel Club in Hamburg, and in 2016 she lived in the Dorothea Schlueter gallery, with sculptures made of ceramics and brass were on view at the same time. Jennifer Bennett is active in various (female) artist groups, has received a number of prizes and grants and has been realizing exhibitions, lectures, performances and concerts in Germany and abroad since 2002.  

Visit: https://jenniferbennett.net/

SAVE, by Jennifer Bennett, publisher Textem Verlang

 

Mentioned in the Podcast: 

Manuel DeLanda, author of 1,000 Years of Nonlinear History

Thomas Kuhn, Paradigm 

Adorno, Nichtidentität, non-identity

Michel Foucault, Panopticon

Peter Weibel, tele society

 

Headshot photo credit: Transmediale