2026
Photo: Studio Lesutis & Miljević
thread, steel, stainless steel
Variable dimensions
Unique Pieces
In German, distinct words can be brought together to produce a meaning that cannot be reduced to either element alone: Welt and Schmerz, Zeit and Riss, Sprach and Not. Meaning emerges at their conjunction, while the constituent terms remain perceptible within the whole. The works take this linguistic structure as a material proposition, giving the relation between its constituent words the physical form of a visible seam. Set against tightly woven EtaProof* cotton fabric – originally developed in the 1930s for military use and valued for its wind- and water-resistant properties – the words appear through an act that chemically alters the very material designed to protect.
Compounds approaches relation through this tension between joining and remaining distinct. Bleaching simultaneously removes and reveals: language appears by making protection vulnerable. Compounding joins without entirely dissolving difference. The seam makes this relation tangible. It does not repair difference; it gives difference a form through which it can hold.
*Weltschmerz: literally “world-pain” – an existential sorrow arising from the discrepancy between the world as it is and as it might be.
*Zeitriss: literally “tear in time” – a rupture or rift in temporal continuity.
*Sprachnot: literally “language-distress” – a condition in which words fail in the face of feeling, experience, or complexity.
*EtaProof has been produced in Switzerland since the late 1990s
To Compound Is to Tremble, Kulturfolger, Zurich, CH