Voebe De Gruyter

In her work Voebe de Gruyter looks at the world as an ensemble of processes that continually influence each other. Materials surrounding us finally look different to the way we imagine them. She takes the viewer to a subatomic level of the tiniest parts.
In 1994 she discovered for instance that there are probably a lot of messages hidden in a flattened piece of chewing gum in the streets. She suggested in the video De kauwgom en de onuitwisbaarheid van zijn bestaan (Chewing gum and the ineradicability of its existence) that when in the mouth of people chewing, the chewing gum actually absorbs the vibrations of his or her pronunciations. When the gum is spit out onto the street the last words spoken are recorded in the chewing gum. In the same notion of these smallest parts Gruyter even suggests that a curator who points to works of art with his or her finger extracts tiny minuscule visual elements from the work. This is why the pictures gradually fade.