Anne Kolbe

My work blends performance, sculpture, and installation to explore the dynamics between the body, space, and objects. I transform the near-at-hand furnishings of daily life into performative elements, to explore their ‘mute’ insistence: their capacity to demand, resonate, and echo through form and texture. My work is grounded in questions of how we relate: across bodies (human and non-human), spaces, and through material entanglement. In my work, camouflage often slips. What remains is the outline of a desire that knows its failure is already form, perhaps leaving behind a softer and stranger shape.

My work originates from a long-standing fascination with the plant world as a radically different life form, one that largely eludes human perception, temporal experience, and systems of knowledge. Within my practice, plants function as autonomous, willful, and often inscrutable subjects that consistently undermine human attempts at closeness, care, and meaning-making.

I am interested in the tension between human desires to care for, understand, and connect with plants, and the fundamental failure of these desires when confronted with vegetal life. Plants grow, respond, and transform according to a logic that does not align with human intention. This unbridgeable distance forms the starting point for my work. I explore what happens when we attempt to situate plant life within human systems of meaning, control, care, and domestication.

A central aspect of my practice is speculative vegetal fiction. For me, speculation functions as a method to temporarily imagine alternative relationships between humans and plants. Through fictional formats - such as performances, sculptures, manuals, magazines, and pseudo-products - I examine how plants are integrated into human routines, aesthetic preferences, and consumer culture, and where these attempts begin to chafe.