Exhibition location:
Laundry House, Via Cletto Arrighi 10, Lambrate Milan
To touch is to feel physically and sense emotionally. We live in a world where our sense of touch is too often numbed, negated, vilified and sexualized. Touch Base, a Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition curated by Ilse Crawford and the academy’s creative director Thomas Widdershoven, explores the power of tactility in human life.
Touch Base explores the counter-movement that many of our students are shaping in response to the empowering, but overwhelming presence of technology and digitalism. It reveals their hunger for a more tactile surrounding in an era where screens, apps, texts, games and email dictate how we live and communicate.
Behavioral psychologists argue that touch is more than just an optional sensation, it is a basic human need, and perhaps even the essence of life. Without touch we are left vulnerable - physically unsure and emotionally insecure. Stripped of a strong link to our physicality, our existence becomes little more than a series of preferences.
"Tactility is a political, a human and a social statement,"
- Thomas Widdershoven.