Home Repair – Participatory Project Series

Suna Mathilde Yoo (Weimar / Hamburg) explores what it feels like to be in the shell of insects and other living beings. The artist aims to establish kin and demonstrate solidarity with and awareness for non-human organisms that are often overlooked. Suna designs armor, mimicry, and detachable body parts, not only to change self-perception and the experience of our surroundings, but also to help understand and approach new challenges. The body extensions that the artist creates provide protection and generate attention, for example during demonstrations, when advocating for the preservation of natural habitats. In a workshop with Suna, we designed and built our own antennas, wings, shields, etc. We wore our new extended body parts on the occasion of the European Climate Strike demonstration that coincided with the opening of the project.

Julia Mensch (based in Berlin and Buenos Aires) explores the amaranth plant as a political actor in the conflict around soybean monoculture in South America. Glyphosate, a powerful herbicide, is used in combination with resistant seeds. Monocultures are established on clear cut rainforest lands, leading to catastrophic consequences for the climate, biodiversity, peasants and indigenous communities. Amaranth, also named kiwicha or yuyo colorado withstands the toxic treatment. Its resilience has gained symbolic power that inspired political resistance. Its seeds were preserved by indigenous peoples, despite the Spanish colonizers’ prohibition. Julia Mensch calls amaranth America’s revenge, relating to the scientist and environmental activist Andrés Carrasco. Through her artistic research approach using drawings, observation and interviews, the artist explores the perspective of the plant and its active role in both local and global contexts.

Colorado (part of Amaranth. Plants as Political Agents in Colonized America) by Julia Mensch is realized within the framework of “Plants_Intelligence. Learning Like a Plant” (2022–2025), funded by the SNF and hosted by the IAGN HGK at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW.

Jonas Kakó (Hanover) preserves moments in the lives of people who are directly impacted by the climate crisis in their daily lives. The Colorado River, the largest and most important river in the American Southwest, stretching over 2,300 km, is acutely at risk of drying out. Its water is extensively used for mass agriculture. At the same time, it is the base of living for around 40 million people, including more than 30 indigenous communities who are particularly vulnerable. Photographer Jonas Kakó traveled the entire length of the Colorado River to capture its stories with his camera. In his work “The Dying River,” he accompanied the Cocopah indigenous community in Mexico. His work earned him the World Press Photo Award in the category of “Single Photo – North and Central America.” At TANKE, we decided to take a new perspective on his work and dive into the stories behind the photographs. As an artist, who is used to have the camera between him and the events passing, this idea afforded a new format. We made the layer of storytelling accessible through a narrative immersive installation, co-designed by curator Josephine Altmeyer, including recorded voice, a newspaper with Jonas’ photos and props related to the journey in the American Southwest.

Franziska Klose (Leipzig) puts on a selective gaze for the urban environment as home for our fellow critters who live from photosynthesis. In her ongoing project Cohabitat, the artist is fascinated by the question how to understand cities as living environments for plants that have developed their own modes of surviving and thriving in the cracks and nieces, front yards and alleyways, parks, balconies, walls, roadsides etc. Taken forward, this perspective leads to the idea, that human urban inhabitants may in some respect be hosts whom the green population has long learned to live from. Franziska’s question strikingly relates to a key notion of the Home Repair series, inspired by Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory. One of the main characters in the book declared: “This is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” Franziska Klose works with the medium of photography. As an art space in an urban setting, we aimed to borrow her lens to create a direct experience in exchange with our surrounding. At TANKE, Franziska led a selective, sensual and speculative excursion in our neighborhood. Guided by the artist, we sneeked into the world of shrubs, trees, flowers edible and decorative plants that virtuously populate the environment that humans often tend to think of as their own.

Jessica Pavone (New York) offers an excursion on the thematic fringes of our annual project Home Repair. The classically trained violist has forged her own path in experimental jazz and new music. She creates sounds as a direct and physical experience, something that, in a literal sense, moves and connects us. Jessica lives in New York where she has established herself in the scene of new music. We are delighted, having been able to host her in Hannover, thanks to a cooperation with the club ausland in Berlin.