Defendants Playpen, 2026
Pine, steel, shredded paper, magnet
4’ x 8’ x 4’
Exhibition view: a space in fourteen traces, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum
Providence, RI, 2026
Defendant’s Playpen is a cage like structure built from stained pine in the style of classical turned furniture. The structure cages the writer, Del Ziegman, as she continues transcribing, turning live language into contained and visible labor. The cage’s poles turn organic and bodily, their surfaces scarred with bite marks that gnaw through the finish. Bars become egg holders, converting containment into a pointless domestic function, where systems of control are dressed up as care, efficiency, or household order. Beneath it all, a floor of shredded paper gathers like bedding for the cage, the soft residue of endless administration.
Defendant’s Playpen hosts a performance “ Live Wire” by Del Ziegman, in collaboration. It was performed in a space in fourteen traces, Gelman Gallery at RISD Museum
While caged by Defendant’s Playpen, the artist types without stopping, transcribing whatever passes through or near. Inner monologue, overheard conversations, mishearings, administrative ghosts, ambient noise posing as thought, all streamed live into another room. The cage doubles as newsroom, defendant’s box, open office, and self-inflicted containment device. The body is staged as a clerk or a culprit, blurring a line between processor and processed. The language, meanwhile, behaves badly. Slips authorship, borrows freely, less of a product than a traffic jam. And the news breaks. Live Wire leans into the aesthetics of bureaucracy where a dog has chewed on the defendant's cage, where the news is always urgent, where though all feels important, nothing can be verified. Writing collapses into nothing more than output, as if the brain were a malfunctioning wire transmitting faster than it can understand itself. Who gets to claim language when it is already mid-flight? Viewers encounter either the body or the spill, rarely both, and are left to triangulate between them, implicated as readers, sources, distractions, co-authors, or simply more noise in a strange system.
-Del Ziegman
Ziegman typed continuously throughout the three-hour opening. She has only the keyboard, therefore she has no way of reading her own typing during the duration of the performance.
Read the whole text here
The text typed by Ziegman is projected live into the adjacent gallery space through a 100-foot HDMI cable suspended from the gallery ceiling.