A Soft School: On Malleability

14—24.05.2026

What does softness conceal? Associated with care and comfort, softness often obscures the labour and history folded into materials that yield and please. This year, the Free School is built around the concept of malleability. It brings together artistic practices that approach malleable materials—and their relation to labour and desire—as sites where power leaves its imprint.

Ali Cherri creates a temporary, hands-on school to investigate the politics and mythology within mud and clay. Bart Seng Wen Long and Kaisa Saarinen trace rubber as a fetishised colonial commodity, its elasticity inseparable from histories of extraction and desire. Faye Driscoll's body-oriented choreographic workshop explores softness in relation to material and performativity. An installation from Doruntina Kastrati turns to Turkish delight factories—like the one where her mother worked—foregrounding the labour required to produce softness. McKenzie Wark shares a conversation on clay, desire, and the malleability of language.

Through artistic practice and reflections in direct contact with materials, this Free School invites participants into the politics of soft matter, a collective investigation of malleability as both attraction and disguise.

Free School 2025 © Louka Van Roy - RHoK

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