SIV LIER

For her project, Siv made a series of hammers using materials found on-site. Staging herself with hammers in front of the camera in different locations around Boisbuchet, she explored what happened when she used the hammers in different environments: what happened was a series of personas emerged. Some of the personas were free and uninhibited, such as the one that emerged while she was dancing bare-foot in the Bamboo Pavilion with a large hammer made with bamboo and textile. 

Whereas, other personas that emerged during this process introduced uncomfortable issues such as colonialism and imperialism. This happened when Siv, dressed all in stripes, danced with a baguette-hammer in the Japanese House to the sound of Edith Piaf … and not regretting a thing. Siv was in fact confronting her own European heritage  to provoke reflections around power structures embedded in design.

With go-pro cameras attached to the hammer and her body, she also experimented with filming one situation from different perspectives, again while interacting with different environments with the hammer always as her medium. This resulted in a series of video performances exploring differences in perspectives.

With a background in furniture and product design, Siv’s plan for her residency at Boisbuchet was to move outside of her comfort zone and explore the more performative aspects of her research. Her experiments and explorations at Boisbuchet led her to realise that rather than using the hammer to hit, Siv would instead prefer to dance with hammers; and rather than demonstrating dominance and power, she prefers to disrupt the usual hierarchy between humans and their objects. Because even though the hammer is a striking tool typically used to forcefully join or break things, it can also be a tool that creates resonance.