Eavesdrop

In Eavesdrop, Nicola Arthen and Rodrigo Red Sandoval propose a space where the boundaries between the domestic and the urban, the intimate and the infrastructural, begin to merge. Their collaboration builds on extended dialogue and a production period at TextielLab in Tilburg, where digital systems were translated into tactile, structured textiles.

I first caught it in the corner of my eye: a lamp, flushed with gossip, trembling as if it had heard too much voltage. The table, meanwhile, made a noise—half sigh, half dial tone—bored of its wooden gravity and longing to connect elsewhere. Somewhere between the outlet and the bedsheet, something hums. A faint, apologetic current, like a city whispering to itself through your wall. You thought it was the fridge again, the faithful white whale of the household, but no—it’s the perimeter calling; the skin of the city has begun to leak inwards. Eavesdrop proposes a space where the systems that sustain our daily lives—logistics, communication, power—are increasingly woven together by the logics of another form of cognition, exceeding their physical boundaries and saturating our environments. Everyday objects—the shopfront, the street lamp, the table on which we eat—are drawn closer and closer until their ordinary functions and scales distort. Within this proximity, new dynamics emerge: the lamp becomes a beacon of transmission, the store a porous interface between physical and digital economies.
The table, now terminal, awaits your login credentials. We type our dinners into existence, we digest our data. Meanwhile, the lamp still insists on its task—beaming out messages in a dialect of lumens and fatigue and the shopfront blinks open like an eyelid. “Everything solid becomes informational,” the manual should have said. What feels grounded, begins to float. The streets plug into our gestures; the body becomes another interface, tapping back. A teaspoon vibrates at the exact frequency of a cell tower—coincidence, sure, but who’s counting? We could unplug, I suppose, though the socket might miss us. Or drift, letting the signal do the thinking.
The exhibition (if that word still holds) is the hum before the click, the shiver before the switch. Eavesdrop is both an opening and an overflow: a proposition for inhabiting the excess rather than resolving it. It asks whether there is still somewhere to go, whether escape is possible, or if we are merely looping through new paradoxes of movement and stillness. Where does it end? Or worse—does it end at all? Perhaps this is not connection but looping: a perpetual sync that mistakes motion for escape. At its core lies a quiet unease: in our compulsive meaning-making, when we think we are up, we are already down again. Resistance hums in the same frequency as surrender.