SIMONA KOCH

Temporary entities in a world of flux

Performative installation with Hilla Steinert | unfired clay | 2023

Nothing in the world is eternal, everything is subject to change – the „flow of materials”, as Deleuze and Guattari call it. Whenever we encounter matter, „it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation” (Deleuze and Guattari, 565).
Nevertheless, people try to fix forms. They create „built environments” – illusions of stability and eternity. But these are also in flux and the components will later become part of other objects and bodies – part of the one stream of life, as Emanuele Coccia describes it in his book „Metamorphoses” (Emanuele Coccia: Metamorphosen. Das Leben hat viele Formen. Eine Philosophie der Verwandlung, 2021

For the opening of the exhibition "Things Leak" (Fox Vienna, 5–19 December 2023) , this primal principle will be translated into space with a performative installation together with Hilla Steinert: Parts are taken out of a lump of clay and formed into bodies / vessels. These clay bodies - which have deliberately not been fired or fixed – are temporary entities.3
Visitors are invited to choose one of these objects and take a sip from it. For a short time, the vessel holds its shape, then it disappears. With „THINGS LEAK“ (Tim Ingold: Bringing Things to Life: Material Flux and Creative Entanglements, 2017), a part of the whole separates for a certain amount of time before returning to the whole.

* This work was inspired by an observation during a trip to India in 2008: at a chai stand, tea was not served in glasses or plastic cups as I knew it, but in vessels made of unfired clay. After drinking, they were smashed and reprocessed into new drinking cups in a natural circular economy.