Touching (the) Strangeness

It starts with touch

Marloeke van der Vlugt’s artistic research trajectory began in 2018 with one simple yet persistent question: what happens when art is not only viewed, but also touches; when tactility, proximity, and bodily attunement become the point of departure? From within her practice at the intersection of performance, scenography, and visual art, Marloeke investigates touch as a relational and performative event arising through encounter, movement, and the interaction between bodies, materials, objects, and spaces.

Meaningful Artistic Research

The doctoral research forms part of Meaningful Artistic Research, a collaboration between Utrecht University of the Arts (HKU) and the University for Humanistic Studies (UvH), which enables artists to undertake an PhD-trajectory in artistic research.

Touching (the) Strangeness

A central concept in this thesis is “Touching (the) Strangeness”. Strangeness refers to the experience that the body sometimes follows its own course, behaves unpredictably, and possesses a knowledge of its own. Strangeness functions as an opening: a space between sensation and reflection in which vitality, curiosity, artistic action, and critical awareness can emerge. Touching is an invitation not to suppress these unpredictable movements, but to notice them, follow them, and investigate what is released through such unpredictability. It describes a mode of being-doing-thinking: a conscious and active engagement with the experience of touch as something unfolding through time and space.

Activating Tactile Sensations

At a time when touch is increasingly associated with risk and taboo, Marloeke instead seeks ways to activate tactile sensations. Ultimately, this thesis does not ask what Touching means, but what Touching can do: how it can recalibrate sensory attention, resist the reduction of touch to risk or taboo, and open inclusive pathways for embodied research in art, education, and ethics of care practices.

About the Author

Artist and HKU lecturer Marloeke van der Vlugt graduated cum laude in 1997 from the Theatre Studies programme at University of Amsterdam with an artistic research project examining the relationship between costume, scenography, video, and movement. In 2019, Marloeke embarked on a new phase in her artistic career: a practice-based doctoral research project at the intersection of Visual Art, Performance, and Scenography, investigating our aesthetic interaction with materialities (bodies, objects, and spaces) through the lens of touch.

Download the dissertation