Vera Kox

On 9 December, the European Union’s Corpernicus Earth observation programme announced that 2024 would be the first year to exceed the threshold of 1.5°C warming compared with the pre-industrial period. At the same time, COP29 in Baku was marked by a lack of decisive action – no clear decision on the reduction of fossil fuels, despite the commitments made at COP28 – and by financial support for developing countries, which are on the front line of the environmental crisis, that remains largely inadequate. Global warming, deforestation, loss of biodiversity – human activities are revealing their deadly impact on the Earth system. For Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher who founded deep ecology (1) in 1973, we need to radically reconsider our relationship with nature by putting it back at the heart of our thinking, far removed from the logic of sustainable development, which he sees, among other things, as a variable of economic growth. He dissociates deep ecology from so-called ‘superficial’ ecology, which focuses solely on technical solutions to environmental problems. 

Thinking about the earth

In her latest body of work, presented at the Konschthal in her home town of Esch-sur-Alzette, Vera Kox is exploring the links between ecosystems, species and materials, in response to the profound upheavals that are shaking our planet. Like Arne Næss, the Luxembourgish-German artist emphasises the intrinsic value of nature. This is not scientific research, but rather a poetic and reflexive questioning in which each relationship between her works contributes to the construction of a rich narrative. Divided into several series produced during residencies at the HEAD centre for experimentation in contemporary ceramics in Geneva and at Ceramica Suro in Guadalajara, Mexico, the exhibition questions the foundations of our ways of being and acting. The artist draws on a singular semantics in her observation of water, earth, geological transformations and non-biological forms of life. She rethinks the usual separations between the living and the inert, between nature and culture, in order to question the narratives that structure our understanding of reality. 

Thirty years ago, the philosopher Michel Serres proposed, alongside Rousseau’s Social Contract , a ‘natural contract’; a form of moral pact between humanity and the Earth based on the reciprocity of exchanges between the two protagonists with the aim of not upsetting the vital balance that unites them. Vera Kox’s work is strongly influenced by this search for fundamental balance, which finds particular resonance in her series of ceramics entitled Viscera. Organic forms with scales – placed on a metal bar suspended by fine ropes – seem to liquefy on the bar, challenged by their own existence. Their survival depends on a tenuous link: this precarious equilibrium is also apparent in his piece …into the peripheral, reflecting, first shown at the Opdahl gallery in Norway. Two hybrid sculptures unfold in silent dialogue, arranged on either side of a steel beam like an inverted reflection. The industrial, infrangible IPN rests in a pool of water inhabited by aquatic plants, creating an opposition between industrial rigidity and natural malleability. At the Konschthal, the discourse changes and the water in the basin gives way to raw clay. As the exhibition progresses, the clay dries out and reveals a fragmented, even desert-like landscape. Each crack marks the surface of the work, highlighting the fragility of the earth’s epidermis, deformed by the effects of time. 
In his sculptures, the artist develops a concept of matter in which earth and water play a constitutive role. Among the elements, earth stands out for its most tangible presence, representing the strongest physical dimension. Attracted by the modes of existence and metamorphosis of this raw body, Vera Kox explores its infinite potential to invite us to question the state of what we perceive as immobile or fixed. She manipulates textures, shapes and perceptions with precision, going beyond substance to reveal a whole range of sensory and emotional possibilities. The material is transformed into language.  
Water, for its part, is not simply a modelling tool, but an essential component of the artist’s language, enabling her to link the visible and invisible worlds. Water blurs, dissolves, moistens, impregnates and alters to encourage the fusion of form with form. It’s as if the power of one element reinforces the other.  
In the film Fallen material, Vera Kox treats landscape in the same way as matter. Using her camera, she contrasts two natural sites, each characterised by extreme conditions. On the one hand, the thousand-year-old glaciers of Spitzbergen, an island in the Svalbard archipelago in the Norwegian Arctic, are melting at a considerable rate. On the other, the volcanic springs of Dallol in Ethiopia, at the heart of one of the hottest and most inhospitable regions on the planet, are alive with the perpetual motion of the site’s chemical and geological activities. In this contemplative face-off, projected onto a PVC sheet, the reliefs of the two viewpoints intersect to reveal a complex mix of beauty and destruction. A soundtrack marked by a single variation accentuates the troubling nature of the film, which reveals the reality of a planet out of balance.  

Making kin (Dona Haraway) 

Vera Kox introduces elements of movement into her otherwise static works with the aim of opening up a reflection on the dynamic correlations between her sculptures, space and our own gaze. Whether in the minimalism of the forms, the recurrence of motifs or the chromatic harmony, each piece finds its meaning in its relationship to the others. This notion echoes the ‘mobile group’ developed by Brancusi, which the artist will be exploring during his residency at the Cité des arts in 2019. As Brancusi was very attentive to the spatial context, he would change the installation of his works on a daily basis in order to achieve the most accurate composition. 

Indeed, a place can transform the perception, experience or very essence of works that come into conversation with it. For Vera Kox, it is no longer just a container, but an essential and inseparable part of the exhibition. Her installation down above, for example, spans two floors and connects two rooms in the art centre. Comprising five downward-curving ceramic discs, the work creates a perfect circle by meeting five upward-curving discs on the lower level. The artist also uses the roof of the Konschthal as a functional element in an installation for irrigating plant moss with rainwater. If the use of moss symbolises regeneration as much as it does the basis of our existence, Vera Kox tends to remind us that nature can no longer be seen as a resilient entity, capable of repairing indefinitely. In her view, this vision must give way to an urgent realisation that our excessive interventions have exceeded ecological tolerance thresholds. 

In a post-anthropocene world that she calls the ‘Chthulucene’, Dona Haraway proposes a radical model of interspecific coexistence. She advocates ‘the invention of a kinship without biological filiation ’², in order to create a space where alternative narratives, which offer new perspectives, and feminist ecological practices, based on a recognition of relations of domination, combine to build an ethic of care, centred on attention, responsibility and reciprocity. In this way, ‘Chthulucene’ transcends conventional boundaries and offers a renewed vision of the world in which other, more serene connections between humans and non-humans emerge.  

In a similar way, Vera Kox inextricably connects real matter with simulated matter, the fluid with the solid, the durable with the impermanent. In a fluorescent green bath, she links her hybrid ceramic productions with fossils found in Spitzbergen and steel rods salvaged from the industrial wasteland of Esch. Creating a dystopian landscape that brings about interactivity between micro-organisms and corrosion; rust and then microscopic life appear over time and become the expression of a body in transformation. As we progress through the exhibition space, a subtle interplay of perspective and form becomes apparent. The landscape is transformed, brought to life and enriched by the presence of new hybrid creatures. The artist invites us to explore a new matrix, fluid and inclusive, where notions of centrality and hierarchy are overturned. Here, humanity is no longer at the centre of life.

There is virtually no human presence in the exhibition. Only cold, inanimate materials (glass, metal, tarpaulin, mirror) and blue corn infected with huitlacoche (3) bear witness to this. These elements powerfully evoke the legacy of the Capitalocene, where traces of life are annihilated in symbols of mutation or decline.

What will humanity leave behind once it’s gone? Vera Kox presents us with an alternative future. In it, nature proves to be sovereign, both creative and disruptive, sometimes ambiguous, now beyond human control. Like the ‘symbiocene’ – a neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht, based on the symbiosis between beings – power structures dissolve. New forces enter into dialogue, capable of co-evolving in a fertile hybrid dynamic. A new map of thought takes shape, where organic and synthetic intelligences converge to form a new symbiotic balance. Far from being a simple rupture, this transmutation invites us to rethink the structures, interactions and continuities between beings and their environment from the perspective of fluidity and absolute interconnection.

‘Sometimes it seems that this story is coming to an end. A lot of us are thinking, from our corner of the wild oats, in the middle of the alien corn, that rather than give up telling stories, we’d be better off starting to tell another one, a story that people might be able to continue when the old one comes to an end.  Maybe.’ Ursula K.Le Guin (4)

1. Arne Næss, ‘The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary’, in Inquiry, 16, University of Oslo, 1973. 
2. Dona Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016. 
3. A disease of maize caused by a fungus; infected kernels are called huitlacoche. 
4. Ursula K. Le Guin, The theory of basket fiction, Université Paris Cité, 2018. 

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Head image : Vera Kox, Sentient Soil, 2024. Installation view at Konschthal Esch. Photo : Christof Weber/Konschthal Esch, courtesy of the artist.

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