Leto Erin Keunen (b. 2000)is a Brussels-based visual artist and designer. Her practice explores gender narratives, domestic rituals, and embodied infrastructures within normative cultural frameworks.

Her work collects fragments, relations and stories from everyday life. She combines and restructures these elements to present them as speculative interpretations that challenge our perspective on power relations and the gestures that perpetuate them.

Everyday habits are turned inside out until they become vulnerable, relational and permeable. Her handmade objects and installations bring together sculptural forms and fluid materials that possess a performative potential. The resulting deconstructions of social conditioning and gender identity translate into spatial interventions suspended in states of liminality.

Fluid Armor

installation
Aluminium, steel, black sand

2024

This sand fountain reinterprets the medieval knight’s armor—not as a fixed shell but as a modular, shifting structure. Using welding, hammering, and other metalwork techniques, I created movable armor plates that can be reassembled, inspired by the historical tournament armor (16th century) and its adaptability. Sand continuously flows through the structure, eroding its rigidity and symbolizing “fluidity in defense”.

This installation explores material transformation and the interplay between solidity and impermanence. By deconstructing armor, it questions traditional representations of masculinity and rigidity. “The knight” is depicted in medieval war stories as the ideal example of how one should handle a conflict: fearless and determined yet calm and thoughtful. Over the years, we have maintained this image of the perfect soldier: strong and rational. His armour was used to glorify the masculine symbol and translates those moral values into physical characteristics of the male body. In other words, the aesthetic of the armour was intertwined with the male narrative and the visual culture of conflict. What is left of those values of masculinity if the armour is deconstructed?

I wrote the article “How the hero became my problem” as part of this work, which was published on “The Couch” the online platform of Het Hem (NL).

Acces the article here:

How the hero became my problem