Merel Witteman’s Aversive Aesthetics project features a series of images produced to provoke feelings of revulsion in the viewer. «Aversion has a paradoxical effect: as much as we want to run away from disgusting things, we feel attracted to them as well,» said Witteman. I took a deeper look into my personal fascination: the emotion of disgust.»
The photo series was on display at the Design Academy Eindhoven exhibition during last month’s Dutch Design Week. «Beauty makes you look once. Dutch Design Week 2014: Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Merel Witteman has created a photo series that includes images of stepping in poo and a dead rodent skewered on a fork to explore our fascination with being disgusted. She asks the question: «Can disgust function as an aesthetic value?»
«The role of the designer is changing, instead of making beautiful products we are telling more and more stories,» she said. Related story: Flesh Chair wrapped in squishy rolls of fat by Nanna KiilThey include a foot that has just trodden in faeces, a mouse impaled on a cooking utensil, snails creeping up the sides of a tea cup, a used sanitary towel in a pair of underwear, red liquid smeared across a woman’s crotch and a finger stuck through the hole of a sticky doughnut. Disgust brings stories» are two examples, which evolved from Witteman’s research and aim to explain the lure of such imagery in simple terms. «But in the way we present our stories we still use the rules of the clean and the beautiful.»
«I thought that with this new role it could be interesting to look into other, unconventional ways of telling a story, and in this way enhance the experience of the public.
