Thread-like Growth on Animated Beings
publication, edition of 50 copies, Riso-printed
2025

Echoing Looiersgracht 60’s past as a printing plant and cardboard factory, Bourlanges synthesizes her essay into thoughtfully crafted booklets, titled ‘Thread-like growth on animated beings’. Written fragments, sourced texts, and visual ephemera emphasize fleeting encounters and relational practices across and between human and non-human worlds, materialize a form of embodied knowledge contained in acts of gathering and assembling that precede the Archive, governed through proximity and drift. Printed in Riso and presented in a limited edition of 50, these delicately assembled volumes will be available for purchase, alongside a curated selection of titles hand-picked by Bourlanges.

In a continued thread, Bourlanges revisits Pollinating Agents – Resilient Beings, an essay she developed during her artistic research fellowship at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (2019–20). Employing a stream-of-consciousness approach, Bourlanges gives shape to embodied processes of knowledge production, emphasizing the intuitive connections that shape our understanding of the world. Here, alternative models for co-existence and mutual dependency, such as cleaning symbiosis and kiss-feeding, reveal unexpected ways of being with others, which Bourlanges connects to her relationship with her daughter – exploring the complex and conflicting experiences of motherhood. How can the Archive account for the invisible threads that draw fragments of experience, memory, and material together, which come to shape how we know, remember, and relate? Can artistic practices make space for what the archive cannot hold: the partial, the sensory, the unresolved?