Christine Kettaneh - Feelers: On Softness, Signal and the Politics of Exposure An installation by Christine Kettaneh

“Feelers” is an art installation comprising a short experimental film and a salt-based sculptural work, created during an artist residency in Niscemi, Sicily (2018). Within a protected oak forest, the artist encountered the MUOS military satellite system—vast antennas built by the United States to transmit tactical data across the globe. Their presence is monumental yet invisible: metallic bodies that pierce the sky while silently infiltrating the ground, air, and bodies below.

The film, titled “Feelers,” draws a metaphor between the MUOS antennas and the sensory tentacles of snails—soft, exposed feelers that navigate through touch. These “world feelers” become a way to explore vulnerability under threat. As the military antennas scan and transmit, they symbolically discover the very thing that destroys the snail: salt. A simple substance becomes a metaphor for targeted destruction—showing how technologies of war work by identifying and exploiting points of sensitivity—geographical, biological, emotional.

“Feelers” reflects on how militarized technologies repurpose perception into power: how to feel becomes to be exposed, and to be mapped is to be made vulnerable. The snail becomes a stand-in for the human—sensing, soft- bodied, and increasingly entangled in invisible systems of surveillance and control.
This metaphor carries into the sculptural work: a series of snail shells cast in salt. Crystalline and luminous, salt becomes both beautiful and dangerous—preserving and erasing at once. These shells stand as fragile monuments, elegies for soft systems turned against themselves.

At its core, the work asks: What happens when the architecture of war touches the skin? When softness is weaponized? In the contrast between metal and membrane, signal and salt, “Feelers” gestures toward a poetics of resistance—where fragility becomes not just a site of harm, but of witnessing.
FEELERS was screened at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome (MACRO) and later won the Best Experimental Short Film prize at the Mediterranean Film Festival, Cannes (2018) and the Art Rights Prize ‘Partner Prize Award’ promoted by Isorropia Home gallery, Milan (2021); it was also an official selection at the Berlin Revolution Film Festival (2020), Under_the Radar film festival, Vienna (2019), and the Madrid International Film Festival (2019).