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.
Wool, silk, bronze
2023
As night falls, visibility in the city decreases. However, there are places in the city that have the potential to bring light to dark urban spaces. Can a night shop—and that neon-lit spot by the door— be a source of life and function as an urban safe space?
This intervention was part of a project about gender-related fear in public spaces. During a year-long proces I introduced various design interventions, objects, and actions that would empower individuals in an urban environment and activate bystanders to take a proactive role in the city.
An intervention in a night shop explores its potential as urban safe space. During the night, a carpet is placed in the shop, bringing together local residents and passersby to engage in conversation about the issue. The carpet is made of white felt, contrasting with the bright colors of the products filling the shelves, and offering a visual release. The material conveys a sense of contraction, transparency, and vulnerability, linking to the feelings of insecurity some people experience. Bronze rings indicate the different night shops in the city. This memento encourages the shop owner to apply the ideas and conversations in practice in the future.
Exhibittion views at the Fabriek, Eindhoven (NL), 2023.