Electrify Everything

As part of the exhibition Botanizing the Asphalt, Marjolijn Dijkman and Pom Bouvier-b. will present the live performance “Electrify Everything”.

The live performance “Electrify Everything” translates the seductive and captivating magic of demonstrations of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment into a critical exploration of the origins of the units and language used to measure electricity. The field of electricity has been developed, manipulated, and named for three centuries to control and apply it. 

“Electrify Everything” invites the audience to reflect on the structuring power of electricity and its relation to resources and exploitation. Pom Bouvier-b. and Marjolijn Dijkman use an experimental technique that brings the organicity back into a phenomenon that, by nature, through the displacement of elementary particles of matter, is dynamic and living. Together, they have developed experimental musical tools to play live with electric currents. They will create a sound composition using the electric charge of specific objects and devices as a medium, playing on the variations of magnetic fields. 

The visual contributions by Marjolijn Dijkman are produced with a high-voltage electro-photography technique in which the artist uses a discharge plate made of conductive glass with a tin coating, the same material used in touch screens. By making visible microscopic electrical interactions, electricity becomes an actor, adopting an almost animistic character. Besides these cinematographic images, Dijkman visually explores the language and visual identity of the terminology of electricity.

Jean Katambayi Mukendi wrote a text for the performance based on the language of electricity. The units of electricity create different chapters that explore the history and the current state of energy production in an associative and poetic interpretation of electric terminology. Trained as an electrician, his works are part of a search for solutions to social problems in Congolese society and the country’s depletion of its enormous energy resources. The recorded text is read and performed by François Makanga.

Botanizing the Asphalt

Artists: Ana Vaz, Alexandre Estrela, Anna Schachinger, Haig Aivazian, Hugo de Almeida Pinho, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, Marjolijn Dijkman, Pedro Henriques, Younes Ben Slimane

Curated by Sara Castelo Branco

The exhibition project Botanizing the Asphalt explores the political role of light in urban spaces at night. Examining the materiality of night and its sensorial, normative, and atmospheric aspects, the potential of the nocturnal as a community meeting space unfolds against the backdrop of pressing social, ecological, and political contexts. The title of the exhibition is inspired by Walter Benjamin’s description (1938) of how the flâneur experiences the city emotionally while wandering the streets, using an allegorical connection to nature. In this manner, the show traces dreamlike forms of meditation on resistance, memory, identity, and place – and thereby opens a broader discourse on the power dynamics embedded in light and dark, visibility and obscurity, the observer and observed.


With the support of DGARTES and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation as well as Mondriian Fund.