Flurina Sokoll creates sculptural assemblages, installations, photographs, collages and texts that arise from the concept of composition in dialogue with bulky waste that has been deposited on the roadside. Her aim is to present these dialogues in such a way as to encourage collective poetic-aesthetic moments of reflection on touch, beauty and restoration, and to allow for the addressing of difficult-to-bear matter.
Working with waste, she feels overwhelmed by major socio-ecological issues of mass consumption and pollution, and thematises this by exploring exhaustion, exploitation, physical and mental overload, injury, responsibility, appreciation, care, hope, fragility and transience. At the same time she talks about her personal experiences and burdens in relation to gender inequality and injustices in care work and the precarious nature of art. To her the interaction with objects is necessary prerequisite for connecting the self with the world and, beyond the external, touching the sensual and meaningful dimension of being (non-)human. She aligns her approach politically and philosophically with Jane Bennett's thing-power theory.
Focusing on the objects found by the roadside, she carefully arranges, restores, modifies and interrogates in a process she describes as 'tactile composing'. Shapes, colours and material properties, as well as rhythms, patterns, stories and images are examined through touch and movement. She stacks, combines, balances, cleans, deconstructs and re-connects by soldering, sticking, sewing, braiding or gluing. In search of suitable structures for sharing the intimate dialogue, she designs metal structures coated with colours. In parallel, she writes and edits texts in which she captures associations, (auto)fiction, wordplay and references to art and design history, attempting to interweave the human with the non-human.
