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Merel Smitt

Country : The Netherlands

(NL)

how to start a movement

Merel Smitt is an artist based in Rotterdam. She studied directing at the Academy for Performative Arts in Maastricht and has completed her Master’s at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam. She maintains an art practice in which she disrupt our everyday life thinking and develops her work together with others through walking, talking, laughing, playing, dancing, observing, gaming, thinking, organizing, writing, learning and unlearning. She shares her artistic tools with whomever can benefit from it inside and outside the artistic field. Her projects can be seen as methodologies to rethink protests and social movements, occupy spaces and build platforms to come together and exchange perspectives.

Participants of her work come together in institutions, (semi)public spaces, and non-physical spaces to explore in an intimate yet collective way the dynamics and rules that we produce, follow and maintain on a personal, political and societal level. She creates interventions that result in installations, websites, questionnaires, safety protocols, fictional institutions, fictional campaigns, walks, audio-tours, workshops, role playing games, scores, mail art and waiting. The work is context responsive and therefore able to take place at all times.

In July 2020, she did a residency at Metropolis in Copenhagen (DK) during which she developed her project called How to wait for your laundry.