Benjamin Janzen
performing a rhizome- domesticated waters 2022

Link to performance: mediathek.hfbk.net/lecture2go-portlet/player/iframe

Benjamin Janzen breaks the artistic concept of performance down to a general conceprt of performance as efficiency. Human exercise on a home trainer produes sweat and nourishes a fungus. A cover sewn from Kombuca stretches around the rower and forms the breedingground for the fungus and thus the skin-like interface between fungus and human. The work ist part od a long-term-research for ways to enter into non-hierarchical connections with mushrooms and to merge the biological and cultural rhizomes into a common rhizome. It takes it´s startingpoint in the Symbiosis between humans and domesticated kombucha, reaching out to expand and highlight the connections between the two organisms.

Shaping what one might call an individual, skin is the interface between the self and the other, a resistant jet sensual organ. Benjamin Janzen works with jellyfish, Kombucha and other skin-entities, challanging the idea of a body limited by it´s skin and leaning towards a rhizomatic understandig of the self, both in a biological and cultural sense. Asking for the parasitic and symbiotic conditions that situate the interaction between human and non-human bodies, he attempt to create a common ground and a shared habitat in which they can coexist.

Benjamin Janzen is currently enrolled in the MA time-based media at HFBK Hamburg. Among others his work has recently been shown at Kunstverein Springhornhof, Künstlerhaus Maetzel and on board the MS Stubnitz.