10 Transpositions in Light and Labour
10
This installation begins with an echo: the rhythm of watering, harvesting, tending.
In Almería, these gestures sustain an industry; in Berlin, they sustain a community. Between them, a fragile warmth lingers, a climate carried in memory, labor, and seed.
The works gathered in this installation were first developed in southern Spain, within the agricultural landscape of Almería; a place where cultivation depends on scarcity, and where the very conditions that enable growth also exhaust it. Installed among living plants and industrial glass, Isabel Law’s video, photographic, and light-based works occupy a space that is both echo and inversion of their origin. Reappearing now in Berlin, they no longer stand as separate objects but form a single, site-specific constellation. The space itself, a working greenhouse cared for by a local migrant community, becomes part of the work’s structure and meaning. Together, the videos, photographs, and light-based elements reconfigure into a new body, one that breathes with the site’s own rhythms of growth, maintenance, and care.
This greenhouse is not a reproduction of Almería, nor a mirror of it, but a transposed version — a double that holds its distance. Within these translucent walls, light and transparency become active materials: revealing and withholding, connecting and dividing, carrying one landscape into another. The installation invites viewers to inhabit this overlap, to sense how two geographies, two climates, and two ways of tending might coexist within a single enclosure.
Transpositions in Light and Labour reflects on what happens when one place settles inside another, when the memory of warmth, movement, and labor migrates across glass and soil to take new root. Between industry and community, exhaustion and renewal, the work traces the fragile continuity of care that persists despite displacement.
Curated by Zeren Oruc
Curatorial text by Zeren Oruc