Dominique Koch, Teeming spaces and troubled vision make good fiction for thinking, installation view, Jide Pinheiro 2019.
Born Lucerne, Switzerland (1983), lives and works in Basel, Switzerland
Teeming spaces and troubled vision make good fiction for thinking 2019
neon lettering installation
Courtesy of the artist
In her artistic process Dominique Koch builds first of all on theoretical material that she overcomes progressively through analogical cascades. It is in the gap between language and reality – as subjective as it may be – that her artistic work plays out. Teeming spaces and troubled vision make good fiction for thinking is a text work, which is drawn from her larger research into the concept of the “Holobiont” and the possibility of understanding biological hypotheses as metaphors for social and political models. The term „Holobiont“, coined by microbiologist Lynn Margulis in 1991, is a technical term for the merge of a host and all its microbiological guests. Koch met the American biologist and feminist Donna Haraway – who relies in her complex theoretical apparatus on the holobiont concept – to talk together about life in terms of symbiosis, co-dependency between different life forms but also about different thinking practices and the fiction between fact and fables. As one of the outcomes of the conversation, Dominique Koch developed different text works that both refer to and extend the theoretical discourse. By means of these text works, a fertile ambiguity inherent to the change of perspective is created, stimulating the exchanges between reality, imagination and alienation and tending to reinvent our approach to reality.
