Stine Hertel
Stine Hertel is a performance artist, light designer and technician based in Düsseldorf and Frankfurt. She runs the department of Special Defects, which explores the performativity of materials and surfaces and builds rogue stage installations. Together with Jan Rohwedder, she founded the performance platform Rotterdam Presenta, which is an interdisciplinary artists community working on formats between performance, installation and concert, between happening and contemplation. In 2017, Stine founded the “Theatre of the Long Now”, a 100-year long performance on a piece of wasteland in Stuttgart, in collaboration with Alice Ferl and Bureau Baubotanik. Her work focuses on the confrontation of human and other bodies and on the power relations between them. In 2018, Stine was awarded the Emerging Performance Artists’ Award of Düsseldorf/NRW.
Stine Hertel
Description of current research
My current work focuses on the destabilisation of power relations between human and other bodies by creating encounters with active, challenging materials. I am interested in negotiating and twisting the dominant position of human bodies on the planet and on stage. Part of this work has led me to what I call „special defects“, which are disfunctional, expressive stage installations. In my collective practice with the Platform Rotterdam Presenta, the interest in material presence has recently led to a research and a project on plastic as an icon of (pop) culture and as a political material that shapes ecological and economic processes.
SPECIAL DEFECTS is a department of installational and performative art that explores the performativity of materials and surfaces, looking for their specific dynamics. It often focuses on the potential of disfunctionality and on irreversible movements. Special Defects can be admired or contemplated on, but they tend to develop their own agenda, challenge us or turn against us. So far, the Special Defects department has worked on liquid chocolate, on tinted superabsorber, on styrofoam, threaded rods and on (fake) blood. In the next research, it will focus on movements of growth as a deformation of space and material.