Jeanne Vrastor



Jeanne Vrastor

in conversation 
with Berber Meindertsma


From the Huidenclub to Prospects

“At Prospects 2026, I continue elaborating on a genealogy of gestures. The goal is not to reproduce traditional gestures, but to follow how they transform when they encounter different materials, technologies and living systems. In this sense, the genealogy of gestures becomes a way to trace how techniques, environments and bodies co-evolve over time.”
—
Jeanne Vrastor
TIME CROSER PLANT-BASED TECHNOLOGY FRAGMENT  PC16 S2 215, Huidenclub, 2025








INTERVIEW
A first iteration of this conversation took place during a talk with Rawad Baaklini on 6 December 2025 at the Huidenclub. Since then, we have continued to discuss and exchange ideas. This interview extends that dialogue.




BERBER MEINDERTSMA (BM) Let’s start with a reflection on the title: A drop doesn’t fall in a straight line. Why this title and what does it mean to you now?JEANNE VRASTOR (JV):The title comes from a research paper by J. Parmentier (2019) on stalagmite formation, which I found whilst researching cave environments. The paper outlines the changing shape of the water drops during their fall due to air friction, which stands at the basis of stalagmite formation. Each drop carries deep earth minerals, which solidify after falling on the ground, adding a new layer of rock. This piece of information blew my mind – the poetics of this phenomenon, imagining how drops create cave environments,go up after going down, becoming rock. Drops are the closest passage to the underground and earliest witnesses of our earthly becoming.

This fact resonates strongly with the way I approach my practice. I see my work as an ongoing and growing body of material composition of performed (material) gestures that mutate and travel through space and time. I work within these dynamics, allowing matter, time, and bodies to negotiate together, attending to what emerges through our capacities to sense and be affected.

EARTH BODY Huidenclub, 2025

       BM
What is the significance of the cave-like space you created for A drop doesn’t fall in a straight line? What does the space of a cave mean to you?        JVCave processes are recurring in my practice. They are both the origin and outcome of planetary development. In the south west of France, where I come from, there are a lot of caves with prehistoric traces of humankind, even though we know that caves were generally not used as living spaces. They were mostly spiritual places, or used for social gatherings where crafts, like basket weaving were developed and practiced. I envision caves as those growing and generating environments that have both witnessed and taken part in human development, situating humans within a web of material relations ranging from stalagmites to microbes. To this day, caves are important places to come to understand ourselves and our environment on a long-term basis.

My material explorations are closely linked to cave formations, and I’ve wanted to create a cave-like environment to bring different material gestures together for a long time. The Huidenclub provided the ideal setting to activate those cave processes. As a former tannery and current creative workspace, it has birthed different gestures and practices of working with and together with materials over time and within different economic contexts.
        BM
You said that with this new body of work, presented in de Huidenclub, you want to propose a genealogy of gestures. Can you elaborate on that idea? And how will you continue this genealogy at Prospects?        JVBodily gestures in relation to practice, technique and material are the driving force of my work. An example of this is basketry making. I began working with basketry practices after questioning the multiple kinds of relationships humans develop with plants, and what this says about our epistemology.

Through this lens, I started to think of gestures as a kind of genealogy. Each gesture carries traces of previous techniques, materials and environments, and connects contemporary practices to much older ways of working with materials. Gestures in craft can become a vector to navigate time and space. When re-creating certain basketry-making gestures, I can suddenly be in sync with a being who lived thousands of years ago but practiced the same gesture. It is a performance that we can only witness and communicate through the product of the craft – in the case of my work Time Crosser Plant-Based Technology Fragment Pc16 S2 215. it is the basketry fragment that has travelled about 9000 years, found and perhaps developed in a cave. As an archaeological artefact, it becomes once again formed through the cave’s environmental processes

The works presented at Huidenclub explored this idea by translating basketry logics and gestures into other materials such as aluminium, biopolymers or microbial leather, allowing these gestures to continue to evolve through new material conditions.

At Prospects, I elaborate on this genealogy by expanding the range of materials and processes. The goal is not to reproduce traditional gestures, but to follow how they transform when they encounter different materials, technologies and living systems. In this sense, the genealogy of gestures becomes a way to trace how techniques, environments and bodies co-evolve over time.

        BM
I’m very curious to see your work in the context of Prospects. Does it include new experiments with SCOBY sculptures?
        JV
Yes, I’m presenting a new work made of SCOBY leather. Working with microbial leather grown from SCOBY was a first for me at Huidenclub. In a similar way to how caves reveal traces of gestures, materials and environments interacting over long periods of time, this living material allows me to engage with invisible biological processes that participate in shaping us. Sculpting a hybrid body whose skin is produced through bacterial activity becomes a way to explore how human gestures intersect with non-human processes. Together they suggest another way of approaching the self as something that develops through material and environmental relations. 

Alongside this, I will deepen my work with wool by introducing wool felting combined with digital printing on silk. These works will also expand a series of aluminium cast basketry branches, Radicantes, and that I previously developed, producing them in a larger format. I will also present one of the Time Crosser Plant-Based Technology  sculptures.


        BM
Whilst working together on the exhibition at de Huidenclub, we have been exchanging various articles, books and films around time and material development. One of them is the science fiction novel The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin.         JVThis book tells the story of the scientist Shevek who attempts to merge the theory of Sequency – the notion that time is linear and successive, with the theory of Simultaneity – the idea that time is cyclical and eternal. He says “Our model must be as inexhaustible as the cosmos. A complexity that includes not only duration but creation, not only being but becoming, not only geometry but ethics.”

Within your practice, you are building towards a cosmology in which time is not linear and not circular either. You are creating what I would like to call “creatures of being and becoming”, merging different temporalities. In your work time seems to be a matter of relation, it is almost like the web or glue that keeps materials together. At the Huidenclub you presented a view into that cosmos. At Prospects you are presenting another chapter of it.

Earth Body, Huidenclub, 2025

         BM
After Prospects, where will these creatures, or you yourself, travel next?

        JV
The works will travel to Estonia in May 2026, where I’m partaking in an exhibition curated by Tiiu Meiner at the Rae Gallery on the island of Saaremaa. The show will investigate the local prehistoric heritage.

This summer I will also be on a research residency focused on experimenting with and developing new materials with the Dirty Art Foundation, part of the redevelopment of Kauwgomballenkwartier at Overamstel.

After that, I will take part in a two-month residency in Greece on the island of Pyrgos to learn about mineral and marble carving. I also hope to connect with local basketry makers on the island and spend time observing the local vegetation. The Mediterranean vegetation I know best, so I’m excited to be surrounded by that. My plan there is to move only on foot across the island, allowing my body to set the rhythm through which time and space unfold.

Time Crosser Plant-Based Technology Fragment Pc16 S2 215,  Huidenclub, 2025






ABOUTJeanne Vrastor
Photo: Roman Ermolaev 

 
 Upon graduating from Sandberg's Dirty Art Department in Amsterdam in 2021, Jeanne Vrastor committed herself to researching the entangled relationships between objects, materials and human beings. She is fascinated by what the entanglement can tell us about how we, humans, can understand ourselves as part of a much wider and messier universe. Vrastor conceives intelligence as a relational, embodied, and material phenomenon. Minds and things are continuous and co-constitutive. We do not merely use objects; we become through them - and the other way around. 

A trademark of her practice is a deep engagement and profound knowledge of the material properties and behaviour. It is as if through her work, Vrastor aims to build intimate relationships with the materials she works with, considering them to be our life lines to ancestral knowledge and future pasts. 

The shapes of her work are based on images she found through online archival research, in the exhibition displays of anthropology museums or body memory. Contrary to common understanding of objects as finished, passive beings, containing the secrets of our past, in Vrastor’s work, material and objects as collaborators with agency. Vrastor has spent an intensive period with the SCOBY, supporting its growth through feeding it sugar and tea, helping it to fight the flies. The aluminium works have had a completely different life trajectory; from archeological findings to archival photos, digital material, 3D models - and now aluminium printed objects.
Written by  
Berber Meindertsma



The work was made possible thanks to the support of the Mondriaan and Stokroos Stiching.


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