Lili Huston-Herterich took the title 'On packing light' from a song by Erykah Badu, in which physical items are a metaphor for emotional baggage. Badu's message is to let go of this, which Huston-Herterich wanted to question in relation to the material practice of everyday life: “Who has the privilege of going through life 'lightly packed', i.e. without material baggage or emotional baggage? baggage from the past? How does this message translate into a cycle of renewing our properties?” For example, Huston-Herterich mixes this emotional metaphor with the reality of a throwaway society, wishing to speculate about how capitalism has shaped our relationship to our personal assets. She wanted to develop this theme in a collective sound work, “a polyvocal intersubjectivity”, into clothing and the sentimental value of textiles.

Huston-Herterich learned to sew her own clothes at an early age and when she moved from Canada to Rotterdam, she started researching the history of the Dutch textile industry. She is interested in clothing as a carrier of personal and political histories. With lectures, workshops and performative arts, Huston-Herterich has a multidisciplinary and, among other things, sculptural practice in which she works with textiles. In Charlois she has her own art space, 'Available & The Rat' and she is working through an assignment in Stockholm on the ongoing project 'System of Radical dependency' on defining artistic practices through online distribution systems. She studied in Toronto and at the Piet Zwart Institute and exhibits in art spaces and festivals in the Netherlands, the US and Canada. The R&D committee considered it an application with fascinating emotional questions by a talented artist, which makes us curious about the outcome.

Textiles were familiar to Huston-Herterich, sound recording was not yet. She started the sound equipment trajectory with Lukas Simonis at Radio Worm in February 2021, and broadcast a first of six episodes there in March. She read literature and talked to other makers, artists and thinkers, such as fashion designer Wakianda and artists Angelica Falkeling (Rotterdam) and Langston Allston (New Orleans). Based on feminist research, she adopted a method of sharing knowledge based on lived experiences, intersubjective conversations and conscious relationships between researcher, audience and subject – in this case sentimental textiles. At Wielewaal Growing Space in July 2021, she created an exhibition of dog and cat toys made from used clothes from the Wielewaal neighborhood, a collaborative project with Larisa David, Sophie Bates, and Honey Jones-Hughes. And in October 2021 she had an exhibition at the Badischer Kunstverein in Karlsruhe. There she showed new sculptural works, poems and a sound work produced by WORM, all resulting from On Packing Light. In 2022 she will make a few more podcasts with Sandim Mendes, Dagmar Bosma and Sophie Bates.