10 No Point of Departure
10
Artists: Isabel Law and Martin Kufieta
Curatorial text by Zeren Oruc
Somewhere between Berlin and Almería*, a vegetable crosses borders, climates, and hands. It begins as a seed in a plastic-covered field, watered by a strained reservoir, cared for and harvested by invisible bodies living in the margins. This exhibition traces that quiet journey. Through works shaped by water, food, and forms of care, two artists respond to the distance that sustains our daily lives.
These gestures do not attempt to answer or accuse. They do not map the full complexity of agricultural systems or trace every consequence. Instead, they offer an opening, an invitation to think through proximity and separation, intimacy and alienation to feel the stretch between a place like Almería and a city like Berlin. What grows in that space? What gets lost in transit?
In 2024, Isabel Law and Martin Kufieta were among the final residents of Montemero Art Residency, located in the Almería region of southern Spain. This landscape, shaped by industrial agriculture supplying the vast majority of Western Europe’s fresh produce, is also home to Europe’s only officially recognized desert. Almería embodies a fragile balance between abundance and depletion. The residency’s closure due to water scarcity now echoes the larger consequences of that imbalance. From this setting, both artists developed works that quietly reflect on care, consumption, and the ecological limits that sustain us.
Isabel Law's work focuses on the psychological relationship with(in) nature in urban environments and spaces where people leave a heavy footprint. During long walks around the residency, she followed pipelines, old riverbeds, and agricultural fields, documenting them as part of a digital map of her movements. Along the way, she gathered plants, which later were used to dye fabrics. Conscious of the water consumption in this process, she transformed the dyed textiles into a quilt: an intimate, but functional object that acknowledges the resources it carries. Her installation brings together fragments of her photographic walks, the quilt-as-a-map, and process monoprints from plant studies, foregrounding the act of tracing, making, and caring. Installed within a framework of industrial materials paired with delicate, intimate forms, her work unsettles notions of intimacy, privacy, and care.
Martin Kufieta works with food as both material and social ritual. During his time in Almería, he explored food through carving kitchen tools from salvaged African rosewood, initiating a postal exchange for self-collected sea salt, and a site-specific installation with a food-based public activation. This translates to the exhibition as a mobile kitchen and action - a site-specific structure that invites participation. From it, he prepares a single dish: pan con tomate. Tomatoes, central to Almería’s export economy and ubiquitous in German kitchens, became a point of connection. Visitors are asked to “buy” a tomato, setting their own price, which Kufieta then transforms into a dish prepared for them. This exchange shifts the logic of consumption: one does not purchase a meal, but rather a raw ingredient, whose preparation becomes a gesture of care, conversation, and hospitality.
Together, these works form a landscape of gestures; tactile, intuitive, and grounded in process. They ask not for answers, but for presence: to follow the path of water, to trace the weight of food, and to stay with it to look a little closer.
*Almería is located in Andalucia, Spain and produces over 3.5 million tons of fruits and vegetables annually. This production primarily comes from 40,000 hectares of greenhouses situated by the coast. While this landscape has become emblematic, it is not unique; large-scale agricultural zones exist throughout the south.