Käthe Wenzel. Urban Organisms

A weed-based color laboratory, costumes made of bones, guerilla billposting, or subversive alternative street-markings for parking areas: Käthe Wenzel works on the periphery of daily urban life, in urban wastelands and in city systems; she uses weeds, roadkill, and conversation. She explores urban landscapes and “Queer Ecologies” as a transdisciplinary border-crosser with a finely tuned sensory perception for new materials and technologies. She focuses on the adaptability of urban coexistence. Urban Organisms encompasses three groups of works—the Urban Ink Lab, works from Signs and Bones, and Sci-Fi Prototypes. In them, Wenzel hijacks urban spaces: she breaks down wasteland areas in Berlin into micro-localized color worlds; endangered species live on in constructions made of linen and bones; and chopped-up visual vocabularies of the city are opened up for collective reuse.