Cecile Hübner makes objects and performances.
I am a distribution centre. I am a lost & found office. A guided tour. An assembly line. Appropriating methods of organized effectiveness to a one-person-practise, I shift between logic and fantasy. I use humor as a tool to create imaginative situations out of ordinary procedures; shape-shifting as a tactic to access realms of (un)definedness. Through these means I investigate the invisibility of care, social relations to mundane objects around us, and how practicalities facilitate feelings. Can a detour be a political statement? Can ambiguity be a tool to make the univocal multiply in meaning?
Currently obsessed with bag-weaving, map-making, and the feeling of the dark. Living and working in Amsterdam. Write me.
I want to lick the city! is an altered version of the usual guided tour given at the post office of Museum het Schip. The post office is located inside an expressionist public housing complex. Its imaginative, joyful architecture is the background to which I question efficiency in architecture, changes in the postal system, and romanticisation of the past. While my words describe the history of the building, my body expresses a physical need to relate to the building through more than words. Is nostalgia a physical feeling? Mimicking each other, the performance is a conversation between my body and that of the building in visual rhyme. I want to feel the building, to become the building, to disappear in it. I want to lick the city!
A series of five lessons at Buurtwerkplaats Noorderhof on the theme of navigation. Guided by maps, quests and legends we collected information from our surroundings. We practiced leaving traces, and following those of others. When does a trace tell a story? Located between logic and fantasy we made ceramic objects that we buried, fired, and dug up again. This is a performative action: the making of our own myth.
Together with Victoria Hoogstoel I am working on a publication about these lessons.
Monster Throat is a physical and digital publication on the disappearance of post offices from Amsterdam. Following the privatization of the postal service a distribution monster appears. It pukes on doormats; flicks through pages; licks stamps. Entangled in a web of world-wide supply chains it restores a bodily relation to the city. Will you lick too? This is an architectural fantasy or nightmare. We are all monsters!
The publication was temporarily available for free at several former post offices in Amsterdam: Oostzaanstraat 45 (Museum het Schip), Westerstraat 59 (Postkantoor Westerstraat), Roelof Hartplein 430 (Openbare Bibliotheek), Bloemgracht 300 (Huisartsenpraktijk Bloemgracht), Wijttenbachstraat 63 (Post Oost), Van Der Pekstraat 49 (PEXPO), Kerkstraat 167-171 (Joe Merino), Albert Cuypstraat 122 (Chinese Jewelry store).
Graphic Design by Théodora Jacobs. Photography by Sankrit Kulmanochawong. This project is supported by the AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts)
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Our Pockets question Consumerism both as an ideology and as a practice historically bound to women.
As an ideology, Consumerism is an economical system in which we get most of our possessions by purchasing. Instead of a possibility amongst others (making, exchanging, finding, giving…), purchasing became a norm. The merchant society takes most of the place in our material life.
Between XVII and XX century, loose pockets -as both a garment and a containerare for women of all classes, a means to negotiate their access to work, public space, consumption, and independence. Through transmission, the making of pockets is part of women’s education. Worn under layers of clothes, they also became tools for petty theft: since the birth of department stores, the history of shoplifting is bound to women.
Our pockets are also means to record experiences of the public space from bodiescraft. wo.men and shoplifters- who share a low or no legitimacy there. They are real or fictitious tools against Consumerism.
Weaving, our small gestures recalibrate our vision of larger systems by exposing some informal places and moments of skill exchange. We propose other definitions to ‘knowledges’, who own them, how they are used and shared.
This project is a collaboration with Mathild Clerc-Verhoeven
These textile sculptures, family portraits and postcards are made for specific distribution centres in the Netherlands. I am interested in these buildings as a physical outcome of an online supply chain that needs to be constantly available, yet absent from the landscape. In order to camouflage, these centres are designed like pixelated versions of the landscapes they are in.
Mimicking their facade, my work investigates their absence, presence and character in the landscape. During the exhibition of the work I invited the audience to write a postcard to a distribution centre to temporarily reverse the supply chain.
click here for a collection of distribution centres painted in the colors of their surroundings
Wrapping up connotations of corrugated cardboard, industrial buildings, landscape and weaving, this work infiltrates effective postal services. Yet these handmade objects deny productive functionality; they translate next-day-delivery into a time consuming craft.
The Building Institute is an experimental and non-formal organization engaging with diverse questions surrounding the subjects of labor and technology. It aims to strengthen the position of femmes in the field of technical construction work. Our imaginary Headquarters brings together works from different divisions in the institute, and in doing so provides a space to share knowledge and skill.
The institute consists of several divisions: the Education Department, Shipping Department, Writing Department and the Public Relations Department. I participated in the Educational Department, where I constructed the Zig-Zag under the mentorship of Olga Micińska. Zig-Zag is an imaginary tool; a handlebar that can be adjusted in its length, like rattle mechanisms. Working with the half-fictional institute offered me mentorship and material knowledge. Its practical but fictive character allowed me to imagine alternative ways of working, both in thought and material.
Publication of my thesis I Want to Be a Distribution Centre
A virtual click activates order pickers, conveyor belts, shock-free wrappings, logistically organized transport and precisely timed delivery. By magic: a package arrives. Underneath its smooth surface is a business that has no time or space for individuality. This publication researches the efficiency of delivery services against the unpredictable movements of drifting, flirting, rolling and plunging.
I Want to Be a Distribution Centre will not explain what a distribution centre is, but it will tell you about the white space on the back of a postcard, about a ship that drifted over the north pole, and about two Shetland ponies in a flimsy metal fence. Shifting continuously through movement, transit, container, wrapping, landscape and language, it is an attempt to wrap a distribution centre in an alternative narrative.
To order one, email me.
Functioning between the person who holds them and the groceries in them: bags are both carriers and carried.
This series of bright-colored, forgotten bags reveal their pink insides and cling to the floor when picked up. They drop all their contents to the ground.
For an exhibition at the Dappermarkt in Amsterdam I made the bags from plastic, like the ones that are used at a market.