I Bruise Like A Peach (2022/2023)

I Bruise Like A Peach
Live-performance + residue artifacts + interactive light installation
In collaboration with artists Sam Janssen and Melting Wang
Duration live performance: ca. 30:00 minutes
Duration healing performance: ca. 10 days
2022/2023

This work is about the fragility of the body, the quality thereof and its functioning. It questions and studies different experiences of fragile, sensory operations to find various forms of (post)humanism.

The artists explore the internal and external reactions of fragility and elasticity by using the body as an instrument. These marks are not there to be “dissolved” or “covered”; they can be signals of visually entering healing and embracing fragility.

Until now, this has been camouflaged in many ways in today’s Western society. In other cultures there is a power and knowledge behind this. In traditional Chinese Medicine, the denotation of the marks is embodied by sensory action of detoxification which has healing therapy, storytelling and internal processes as connotations.

Ros performs a live cupping session on her own skin and flesh, while interacting with the light installation. After the live performance, she investigates her healing and the processes that the marks go through during an average period of ten days. This detoxification process helps to facilitate the flow of ‘Qi’ in the body. Every mark has its different stages of pigmentation, process of resetting and healing, and pattern palette. This is all connected to various connotations and meanings linked to that exact area of the body; corresponding with the muscles, blood regulation and stagnation, tension, the skin, meridians, states of inflammation, illness and stress relief. This differential analysis is based on traditional Chinese medical thinking, which offers the most comprehensive and methodical reckoning available on this subject. Ros also refers to this as her ‘healing process’, which is recorded on the basis of documentation in the form of photos and a log. (Coming soon)

The work has been a continuous process in which the installation and the body are always adjusted by means of the fluidity thereof. The installation is handmade by Sam Janssen and consists of a large transparent surface which is illuminated by a programmed light software based on the development of the marks as results of the live cupping session by Lisette Ros. The panel is filled with interactive fluids.


* The ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–5).

Lisette Ros and Sam Janssen I Bruise Like A Peach art performance on light installation with cupping session 2023. Photo by Davids Danoss at the launch at time is the new space in rotterdam
Lisette Ros and Sam Janssen I Bruise Like A Peach art performance on light installation with cupping session 2023. Photo by Davids Danoss at the launch at time is the new space in rotterdam
Lisette Ros and Sam Janssen I Bruise Like A Peach art performance on light installation with cupping session 2023. Photo by Davids Danoss at the launch at time is the new space in rotterdam liquids.
Lisette Ros and Sam Janssen I Bruise Like A Peach art performance on light installation with cupping session 2023. Photo by Davids Danoss at the launch at time is the new space in rotterdam
Lisette Ros new work I Bruise Like A Peach art performance abstract shot 2022. Photo by Marieke Gras.

© In collaboration with artists Sam Janssen (light installation) and Melting Wang
© Short video and photos by Davids Danoss
© Analogue by Marieke Gras
© Lisette Ros