Sandra Knecht invited to the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia by Koyo Kouoh.

Artist Statement:
Home is a Foreign Place, “In Minor Key” Biennale Venice
Objects carry worlds within them. A worn threshold, animal and human dwellings, the trunk of a pear tree cast in bronze after it was felled in a storm – these are not symbols. They are testimonies.

Home is a Foreign Place is an installation that has emerged from a lifetime of studying: the things we keep, the things we conceal, and the things that continue to live in the body long after they have left our hands. It is dedicated to the living, to what will soon be dead, and to that which compels change and transformation.

I am interested in objects that are meant to remain hidden and yet persist in being there. A force that quietly accumulates in spaces. Meanings imposed from the outside, which the body absorbs without being asked.

The installation Home is a Foreign Place is also concerned with an aesthetic that has accompanied me, and my way of seeing the world, throughout my life, and which is rooted in both scenographic and craft traditions.

The work traces a process – the moment in which the familiar becomes foreign. Again and again, the relationship between the body in space and the access to it is reshaped . It is the shift of what once was nameable in this world, in which a named thing loses its name.

This is not nostalgia. It is the unease of belonging – to a place, a body, a species, an epoch. Home, I believe, is always also a foreign place.