Transitional Terrains

Between the deep time of the bog and the ceaseless breathing of the coastline, Transitional Terrains unfolds as an exploration of sites shaped by their spatio-temporal rhythms. In the moorland, time pools— centuries of sediment, memories and myth, half-swallowed by peat, resistant to decay. By contrast, the littoral zone of Roaringwater Bay constantly reshapes itself, the tide drawing and erasing an in-flux border that never resolves into permanence. At a time when dominant narratives erase the nuances of marginal spaces, Transitional Terrains foregrounds storytelling as a form of quiet re-enchantment. To trace the contours of a bog or a coastline is to acknowledge that all terrains—material and psychic—are shaped by the stories that are cradled along or within them.

Return to the Sinking Ground, 2024 – 25 For Max Brück, Yulia Carolin Kothe, and Katerina Sidorova, the bog is both repository and collaborator— a place where organic and cultural residues layer over centuries. This work marks the return of gathered elements: bog sounds, recorded voices. clay vessels, and organic fragments to the Irish landscape where they were first encountered. Initially carried away through a collaborative artistic process, these materials now return, not as extracted resources, but as story-holders. Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, the project frames the bog not as a passive setting but as a generative container: a vessel of memory, sensual knowledge, and relation. The visitors are invited to dwell in this temporary landscape that consists of an uncanny merge of made objects, packaging materials, recorded sounds, memories that linger and the soft ground.

Abécédaire of Fringes, 2024 – 25 The collaborative practice of Lorenzo Rebediani, Vera Scaccabarozzi, Luca Trevisani, and Francesca Verga draws on the fragile in-betweenness of the coast—a liminal zone that oscillates between salty submergence and windy exposure. Abécédaire of Fringes, an installation and book sharing the same title, both arose from their shared curiosity for this edge-world, embracing the provisional nature of these intertidal stories. This ecotone in Roaringwater Bay is marked by a carpet of varied algae and the odd, which became the focal point of their work. The artists collected, dried, photographed, and printed the seaweed onto large fabric pieces. The algae, along with other ecotone dwellers, are flattened like specimens in a herbarium, in an ironic and counter-intuitive gesture that challenges Western scientific paradigms. Seaweed is also central to the Abécédaire of Fringes book, being a recurring presence in the narrative. By embodying the intricate web of connections that define the fringes, this cryptogamic organism inspires Abécédaire of Fringes as an experiment in liminal material writing—a process of collectively tracing, rather than analysing, the unexpected interrelations of elements that inhabit the margins.

About the artists Max Brück grew up in a small village in Hessen. He studied Fine Arts at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Offenbach am Main and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. After graduating in 2019, he received a work stipend from the Kunstfonds Foundation in Bonn and an upcoming young talent award from the Frankfurter Künstlerhilfe. In 2022, he was awarded a travel grant from the Hessian Cultural Foundation, which allowed him to explore industrial sites in Poland. Since 2023, Brück has been a research assistant in the Experimental Space Concepts department at Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach. His work focuses on personal and site-specific memory. Recently, his work has been presented at various venues, including Rondo Sztuki (Katowice), Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt), Berlin Art Week (Berlin), and Bistro 21 (Leipzig).

Yulia Carolin Kothe is a visual artist based between Glasgow and Frankfurt am Main. Her practice moves between sculpture, sound, writing, installation, and performance, often responding to archival material, queer feminist theory, personal, and oral histories. The processual nature of her practice breaks away from the notion of a singular, finished work and leads to site-specific and contextual modes of display. Kothe has completed a master’s degree at the Glasgow School of Art and the Kunsthochschule Mainz. Recent works have been shown at Kunstverein Bellevue-Saal, Wiesbaden (2024), David Dale Gallery, Glasgow (2023), Neuer Kunstverein Mittelrhein, Neuwied (2023), French Street, Glasgow (2023), Rosa Stern, München (2022), Atletika Gallery, Vilnius (2020).

Katerina Sidorova is a visual artist and researcher based in The Hague. Working with installation, performance, and text, she looks at multiple facets of mortality and necropolitics in her practice. She obtained a BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University, Russia, an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art and a PhD from the Philosophy department of Yaroslavl State Pedagogical University. Recent group exhibitions include Bottleneck at West, The Hague, As a Pile of Ash at 16 Nicholson Street, Glasgow and Gläserner Mensch at Dürst Britt and Mayhew, The Hague. Her latest publications are Martyrdom Body State Manifesting Power (2020) and The Game of Knives (2022). Lorenzo Rebediani and Vera Scaccabarozzi are landscape architects. Together they founded the Rebediani Scaccabarozzi Landscapes practice in 2018 in Milano. The studio works on the complex entanglement of the processes that define a landscape. Their gardens aspire to be living systems capable of growing and evolving with the people who inhabit them. They collaborate with international architectural firms and are lecturers at universities and cultural institutions. Their projects range from private gardens, community environments, and ex perimental cultural projects, to museum landscapes.

Luca Trevisani is a visual artist. His multi-disciplinary practice has been exhibited internationally in museums and institutions. His research ranges between sculpture and video, and crosses borderline disciplines such as performing arts, graphics, design, experimental cinema, and architecture, in a perpetual magnetic and mutant condition. In his works, the historical characteristics of sculpture are questioned or even subverted, in an incessant investigation of matter and its narratives.

Francesca Verga works on curating, management, and research in visual and performing arts. Currently, she is co-artistic director at Ar/Ge Kunst, Kunstverein in Bolzano-Bozen, and was Assistant Curator at the Italian Pavilion (Venice Biennale, 2024). She holds a PhD in Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam (2022). With a master’s degree in Museums Management (Milan, 2013), she held the position of General Coordinator for Manifesta 12 (Palermo, 2018) and was Curatorial Coordinator at the biennial Manifesta 13 (Marseille, 2020).

The series is curated by Ben Livne Weitzman.