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Touchy-Feely

Probing thresholds of perception- those fragile edges where the mind flips meaning, where the inert feels animate.

Touchy-Feely — © Freek van Dillen

TF is bringing disruption into sensory realm. Steel, often associated with rigidity and permanence, was made to hum, shift, and breathe. By blurring the line between solidity and sensitivity, I invite the audience to question how we relate to materials, to spaces, and to own sensory awareness.

A dance with uncertainty

Touchy-Feely is an immersive installation that invites visitors into an encounter with matter at the edge of perception. Constructed from steel, ordinarily associated with weight, rigidity, and permanence, the work defies expectation by revealing a surprising sensibility. The structure does not sit in stillness; it hums, shifts, and almost breathes. Subtle vibrations respond to the environment, creating an impression of intimacy within a material normally regarded as cold and unyielding. By blurring the distinction between the inert and the animate, Touchy-Feely transforms industrial matter into a vessel of fragility, poetics, and care. Visitors are encouraged to lean in, slow down, and notice the delicate resonances that arise when body, sound, and sculpture meet.

A dialogue between opposites

At the heart of this project lies an exploration of how we perceive and misperceive reality. Touchy-Feely becomes a sensory threshold: a place where touch, sound, and motion converge to destabilize certainty. The work is not didactic but experiential, urging the audience to inhabit a state of heightened attentiveness. As the viewer draws closer, the smallest shifts, a low vibration, a tremor in the structure, become amplified in meaning. In this way, the installation stages a dialogue between opposites: solidity and softness, geometry and vulnerability, distance and closeness. It asks us to consider how perception is never fixed, but continuously reconstructed through our interactions with space and matter.

A choreography between visitor and material

For Manifestations, Touchy-Feely resonates with broader conversations on technology, design, and human experience. By coaxing steel into sensuousness, the work challenges assumptions about what materials can communicate and how environments can feel alive. It reflects a world where boundaries, between object and subject, animate and inanimate, are dissolving, urging us to find new ways of sensing, relating, and being present. The installation is not merely a sculptural object but an experience: a fragile choreography between visitor and material, reminding us that even the most rigid structures hold the potential for movement, empathy, and transformation.

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About Darja Gladkaja

I gather what’s discarded. Scrap, debris, broken things made into fragile structures that strain, sprawl, or shiver in place. Nothing is finished; everything is becoming. My work lives in the in-between: collapse and expansion, ruin and reach.