(◕‿◕✿)
Kim Bode's practice has been exploring landscapes as material and physical space, a collective idea and political terrain. Based on these foundations, the research investigates transformative aspects as well as the interstices of artificial habitats and ‘natural‘ environments and how they collapse on each other.
Their artistic research corresponds with (and refers to) central ideas of critical anthropology, postcolonial theory, eco- and geopolitics, queer theories and xenofeminism, plant-behavior and decolonization of nature engaging them into an interdisciplinary and hybrid practice that bridges the fields of sculpture, sound, photography and installation. Bode’s work revolves around the presence and the agency of human as well as non human actors, precarious living conditions and the perspective of social struggles inside threatening/threatend environments.
The field recordings and the visual documentation of landscapes have resulted into the creation of an expanding personal archive. This archive is a network of ideas and senses that form the point of departure for their installation pieces. They use parts of it to create assemblages of sculptures, sounds and images, evoking uncanny and eerie atmospheres. Furthermore, Bode often uses organic morphologies and shapes which reoccur in their work, sometimes even in the form of uncommon plant species. All of which conjure the elements for an otherworldly storytelling practice.
Bode's work distances itself from idealized or romanticized notions of the ‘natural’ environment and of the concept of human mastery over 'nature'. Instead it understands landscapes as powerful, autonomous entities.
_
Kim Bode is part of the artistic research groups bureau of transitioning landscapes and N*A*I*L*S.