Sweat Suit series

Costume

used PVC, sewing thread, tool belt, rubber boots

custom-sized

Kirchberg draws the tradition of Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Maintenance Art into a post-conceptual, fictionalized playfulness, not out of a romantic nostalgia for manual labor—but to point us to the low-fi residue of care work that can’t be automated or optimized or valorized, a repetition that remains borderline nonsensical. And where we can’t reduce “care” to the heroic fulfillment of need, it will also—this is what the Care Mechanic shows us, too, with their gentle touch and suggestive gloves—always be hot. A matter of desire. - Maxi Wallenhorst

Sweat Suit 1+2 are hazmat-style suits sewn from used PVC and custom-made for a duo of Care Mechanics—a hybrid term coined from the professional titles car mechanic and care assistant—who maintain the artist’s sculptures and installations as a performative act. Designed both as protective workwear for shielding the body from potentially toxic fluids during maintenance performances and fetish object, the suits blur the boundaries between protection and provocation, utility and fantasy. As a fetish object, the suits engage with the sensory and erotic potentials of PVC - a material that is both erotically charged and emblematic of ecologically destructive, extractive systems. As such, the work addresses the perverse intimacy between the body and the infrastructures of petromodernity.

Special thanks to: Lena Böckmann

Photography: Philippe Gerlach

With the support of: Cultural Endowment of Estonia