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.
materials: Copper & Steel
2023
When people move through the city, it is often to go from point A to point B. Once night falls, there are few people who would willingly stay in the places where most women would be afraid. In small alleys, dark parks, or by the waterfront. What would happen if someone purposefully looked out for the safety of others in those places and assumed the role of a ‘rescuer’?
The chair can be adaptively installed on existing lampposts and women’s experiences can be heard through a megaphone. Whoever sits in this chair becomes the eyes on the street.
This chair 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.
This piece was exhibited at De Fabriek during Dutch Design Week 2023.