The long middle is a collaborative exhibition by Marie Ilse Bourlanges, Youngeun Sohn and Romy Day Winkel. Through sculpture, installation and performance works, the exhibition takes weaving as its underlying logic and as a way of thinking about embodiment and materiality.

The long middle explores bodily engagement with materials like silk, hair and willow bark, and the works share an interest in maintenance work: actions that must be performed continuously in order to keep things going. Weaving thread, shaping bark, and brushing hair are all durational gestures. Through them, materials and bodies are kept in use, shaped by prolonged contact with one another. This closeness to material can be tender, yet also awkward, tedious, or uncomfortable. The exhibition does not idealise this work, but stays with its ambivalence.

The exhibition title draws on multiple references, including Kate Briggs' book The Long Form, which reflects on the sustained effort of creative work while caring for a child. 'The long middle' also refers to the challenging middle phase of a project, after novelty has settled but completion remains open. A mode of labour that is ongoing and often invisible. By allowing such tensions to remain unresolved, The long middle resists sanitised narratives of bodily engagement with materials. Contact is neither purely nurturing nor purely degrading; it is a fact of working with and through bodies.

This ambivalence resonates with the history of puntWG, housed in the former Wilhelmina Gasthuis, where bodies were shaped by regimes of care, control, and hygiene. Working within this history, the exhibition refuses the clean separation between care and strain, maintenance and exposure, tending and being worn down.