Merel Smitt is an artist based in Rotterdam. She builds immersive installations and creates interventions in the public space that interfere with our daily lives. Her work is research based, site-specific and the audience, knowingly and unknowingly, participate in various ways, being actively present. You can come across one of her projects in situations or settings where you don’t expect art to happen.
Her projects often result in multiple outcomes that can be seen together as a whole but can also be experienced separately. The output consist of all sorts of interventions, varying from installations, websites, fictional campaigns, score-books, audio-tours, walks, role playing games and so on.
In her work she researches, exposes and questions political and social systems within our society. The impact of her work lies within the participants; they become aware of the way certain frameworks, norms and expectations produced by these systems influence our environment, behavior and interactions.
Her projects can be seen as methodologies to rethink protests and social movements, occupy spaces, raising voices and setting something in motion by finding ways to react to these political and societal topics together.
To shape the actual and artistic content she often collaborates with performers, graphic designers, web designers and researches different perspectives by speaking with communities, philosophers, activists, government and social workers, companies and experts.