Under the Weight of Lovely Things
Eline Antonine Zeevat
Antwerpen, België
About
Eline-Antonine Zeevat (1998) is a multidisciplinary artist and welder, currently based in Antwerp, BE. Through installation, sculpture, moving image, and material interventions, she translates experiences of pressure, resistance, and transformation into material form.
Project
My current practice rests at the intersection of dominant structures I inhabit and consecutively perform whilst I’m far from actually understanding them, being a ‘meisje, droom jij maar verder’. With this constant in mind, I reflect on the structures entwined in me, close to me, part of the system I’m in. The work emerged from a desire to understand the structures that held me close and quietly taught me how to disappear within them, to understand what has shaped me.
Experiences of being directed, influenced, and manipulated inform the material language of the work. By reclaiming materials linked to construction, order, and authority, I attempt to make these mechanisms tangible. The materials, such as the suspended ceiling and concrete, are often associated with male-dominated environments. By using them within an artistic context, I appropriate, (misuse/) use them, and want to initiate a dialogue about their values, with the idea that they symbolize something greater.
Through multidisciplinary installation consisting of girlhood glitches, gendered whispers, and inherited blueprints, I explores how patriarchal structures become internalized and reproduced through everyday gestures, until somewhere beneath the weight of being lovely, pressure manifests and the body starts glitching. In the processes of de-, re-, and construction – the installation navigates through unbearable bearing and the silent violence that emerges when dominance settles within the self.
While rooted in autobiographical experiences, vulnerabilities and forms of violence - translated into this installation, I do not approach these as universal truths. They are shaped by my position as a white, bisexual cis woman and remain only one situated perspective among many.
The realities of trans women, non-binary, women of colour, undocumented women, disabled women, and many others are shaped by different forms of power, exclusion, and risk. This work therefore does not attempt to speak for others, but rather begins from the specificity of my own position in order to reflect on the larger systems that move through it.
The work begins within my body, but it does not end there.
