Laura Flethe

“Moving words: a body glossary” presents video essays that explore how meaning is created through the body, becoming an archive of the research process and gestures that hold us together. Part of “Practical proposals of what-might-be” by TogetherTogether Collective.

“Whispering bodies: scores for the we”, tells a story about the search for collectivity, the joys and frictions of shaping a ‘collective body’, visualizing the intangible relations. Part of the project “Practical proposals of what-might-be” by TogetherTogether Collective.

In a world where every gaze holds power, this digital opera invites you to step into an immersive loop of seeing, watching and perceiving. Where our eyes meet explores the paradox of wanting to escape the all-perceiving eye, while simultaneously seeking connections, yearning to be noticed and understood. Through a fusion of compelling melodies, colorful vocals textures and dynamic visuals the work challenges you to reflect on the nature of perception itself. This intricate dance between watching and being watched unravels the quiet tension we encounter inhabiting this world. In the dance of seeing, watching, and perceiving, will you embrace the gaze, or will you try to escape it? Project in collaboration with Stefano Cattani, Zaza van Duijvenbode, Floor Dijkstra, Marius Blokhuis for Opera Forward Festival of the National Opera & Ballet Amsterdam, supported by Sjaron Minailo.

Based on a research conducted in my master’s Non Linear Narrative at the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in collaboration with the Dutch National Archive, “Mapping Otherwise” investigates the colonial roots of cartography and contemporary mapmaking practices. Modern cartography builds on colonial methods and aesthetics, abstracting and dividing land into empty squares and borders. Maps have always been an apparatus, not only of navigation, but also of oppression and violence. “Mapping Otherwise” challenges the notion that mapmaking is objective and neutral. Instead, it recognizes maps as subjective and political documents, that shape perception and navigation. The site-specific workshops seeks to understand and disrupt these modern colonial ways of emptying and containing our animate world through collective and embodied mapping in which we explore alternative cartography. 

Following my search for the missing memories of my father, who passed away when I was four, the film blurs reality and fiction in an exploration of grief, memory and imagination. “memories of what never was” is a reflection on collective reminiscence and myths built around the person he was, and it tries to reconnect with the remembrances and fantasies of the unreliable mind of a child. Through learning how to build a kite as my father used to do, I try to build a relationship with him, embody lost memories and unfulfilled experiences. I search for presence in absence and wonder if we can create new memories with lost ones.

In zero gravity, we invite astronauts and space dreamers to drift beyond the constraints of colonial imagination. This video extends a call to the European Space Agency (ESA) to join us in a space where floating becomes a method. Where we reconsider the ethics of space exploration, not as an extension of extraction, but as a chance to reimagine our place in the cosmos. Through movement, conversation, and weightlessness, we seek to escape the rigid frameworks of domination that have shaped planetary and extraterrestrial exploration. This is an experiment in storytelling, a speculative fiction unfolding in real-time. It is a reminder that space is not a blank canvas for human ambition but a shared environment. Project with Rita Gaspar, Carmen Draxler, Juliana Acero & Miche O’Higgins, filmed by Yavor Minchev, as part of Moonshots of the European Space Agency.

“Unearthed” looks at the most promising geoengineering project in Dutch climate combat history: PORTHOS at the Port of Rotterdam. As a quick fix for climate change, existing pipelines are currently transformed into an infrastructure that PORTHOS will use to compress excess carbon from port industries into the sandstone of depleted oil fields offshore. This technology is known as Carbon Capture and Storage. Regarded as an inevitable tool by the Dutch government to meet national climate goals, we ask who really profits from this expensive and short-lived technology. To bring the extractivist nature of the projects’ capitalist agenda into view, Unearthed maps the public discourse around CCS and gives voice to the often ignored more-than-human realm. On a site of speculative archeology, visitors can listen to the stories of three future finds that challenge human exceptionalism and expose the nuance needed to understand our deep entanglements with the North Sea. Project in collaboration with Carmen Draxler.

The work challenges the notion of objectivity and neutrality in mapmaking, stating that a map is subjective and political. By exploring alternative cartographies in collective mapping-gatherings, “Mapping Otherwise” re-imagines different ways of seeing the world. Through a site-specific workshop on Lange Voorhout, the work invites people to share
their experiences and understanding of the street; these are translated by participants into movement, becoming a choreography. The captured movements are present in the exhibition as moving images, suggesting an alternative to the traditionally flat and fixed form of a map. Projection as part of the exhibition “Cows at a Puddle” in Pulchri Studio, curated by Jiyoung Yim.