Brigade's current group exhibition brings together five artists to confront the concept of Zugzwang, a situation in chess, where every possible move worsens ones position, mirroring the modern paradox of entrapment in the very systems we as humans have created. Through their works, the exhibition maps this collective paralysis, exposing the invisible rules and strategies that lure us into the system.

Here, Amanda Lydért discusses her work, whether or not she plays by the rules, and the absurdity of the game.

Can you expand on the series of work you have included in the exhibition and how you think it relates to the concept of  Zugzwang?

This series connects to zugzwang  by dealing with motherhood and ecology as states of constant negotiation and consequence. The works begin from personal experiences of early motherhood, but they also function as ecological allegories, creating a parallel between the human mother and  "Mother Earth"

In the work God's Creek, the regulation of rivers (Guden-åen) mirrors the regulation of the maternal body. The phrase "I get dressed for the floods" and "to dress up for an expensive and devine deluge" refers both to breastfeeding and to ecological catastrophe, blending images of bodily transformation (and/or perception of same) with environmental collapse. In Interlocking, the iris flower becomes a symbol of both personal and collective loss of innocence, exposing imagery associated with oil spills and pollution.

Across the series, I work with the tension between the maternal body (both human and ecological) as something controlled, regulated, and gradually desexualised, and the longing to reclaim it as unpredictable, resistant, and savage.

In that sense, the works reflect the pressures of navigating systems where care, desire, control, and extraction are inseparable, and where every negotiation between giving and receiving leaves a consequence - a mark.

Zugzwang refers to a state of entrapment within the rules of a game. How do rules affect your process when working?

I have a complicated relationship to rules. To systems, order of dogmas - to rules as elements of a concept. I tend to over-conceptualise and I create a wealth of internal concepts within the overall (what might look cooled on the outside is never that). And then I get trapped whithin my own labyrinth of rules as I am not very good at following them… I looove to make them up - but I don't like to repeat them and I don't have the temper nor the patience to stay with them to the end… I crash…

Often, I can only get around that crash by improvising a new set of rules that make room for the inconsistency allowing the system to shift while I'm still inside it. Like a cheat code in a computer game that lets me bypass the system just enough to keep it going, even when it breaks its own logic.

The damned if you do, damned if you don’t logic suggest an element of absurdity to the exhibition. Perhaps reality is not as black/white, but do you find any truth to this?

Yes, definitely - surely reality is in no case completely black and white. For me, the absurdity comes from how contradictory many structures already are. Especially around motherhood and our relationship to nature, there are expectations that almost cancel each other out.

Nature is cultivated, regulated, and extracted from, but at the same time expected to remain fertile, beautiful, and endlessly generous. I think there is something inherently absurd in that imbalance. The works in the exhibition kind of linger inside those contradictions instead of trying to fix them. It reflects a world where giving and taking, care and control, are entangled, and where the traces of those negotiations remain in both the body and the landscape - as absurd scars.