Free heavy beautiful

by Silvia Bombardini

          Imagine Bonne Espérance as a walk-in wardrobe. The wardrobe which is also an archive of the worn. The archive which is in turn a repository of affect, causing affective responses in the one who visits it (Cifor and Gilliland 2016). Like consumer objects in a capitalist economy, Julie Stavad’s artworks in Free heavy eautiful “are able to produce all kinds of affective allegiances” (Thrift 2010, p.292). But if the artworks we come across in Bonne Espérance as a wardrobe, as an archive, ever were objects of consumption, their relation to exchange and use was severed in displacement. And it’s this displacement itself that causes in the visitor the affective response it does – that makes us feel, this or that particular way. Their objecthood itself may be questioned: are these objects or are they things, out of which objects are materialised by the perceiving subject (Brown 2001)?

          Not quite a biographical archive, nor fully imaginary, traces of personhood can be surmised from the things that Stavad puts on display – a shed second skin, of paper and nylon. The stories they tell are whispered: sensuous encounters of contradictive elements, open to interpretation. Enchantment (Bennett 2001) in intra-action (Barad 2007). There is about them something vulnerable, or at least permeable, secured for the time being but only ever a zip away, in the pellucid garment bag of Jeg er ikke en fabrik [I am not a factory]. There is also a certain tension, not quite hostile, but insistent. The missing female body echoed in the teeth of forks jutting out of a late Victorian shoe in Restless and sly, in the bony joints of a table lamp wrapped in a stocking in Eye and Knee (dancing to their own beat while waiting for the restroom). Perhaps rather than consumer objects, it is “the habitual material culture” which “both reinforces and rebels against the systems in which we reside” (Sampson 2020, p.104), that is both displaced and displayed here. With these artworks as stepping stones, not unlike what we all do when we get dressed, visitors to Free heavy beautiful at Bonne Espérance are invited to piece together their own narrative.

— May 2025

Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

Bennett, Jane. 2001. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Brown, Bill. 2001. ‘Thing Theory’. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22.

Cifor, Marika, and Anne J. Gilliland. 2016. ‘Affect and the Archive, Archives and Their Affects: An Introduction to the Special Issue’. Arch Sci, no. 16, 1–6.

Sampson, Ellen. 2020. Worn: Footwear, Attachment and Affects of Wear. London New York Oxford New Delhi Sydney: Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

Thrift, Nigel. 2010. ‘Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour’. In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, 289–308. Durham, London: Duke University Press.