KBF Residency artist Juliane Tübke delves into bond between humans and environs

Kochi / February 24, 2026

Kochi, Feb 24: Once worshipped with devotion, Nature today is exploited. Forests are felled, hills mowed down, marshes and wetlands filled, melting ice warms up the world, and rivers vanish or get flooded, disrupting nature’s rhythms. Tragically, people hardly realise that this reckless spoliation affects them and all creatures as well.

Kochi Biennale Foundation (KBF) Residency artist Juliane Tübke, a German, delves into human-environment relationship, how changes in weather affect water and soil, each repercussion reflected in humankind and the devastating traces they leave behind, transforming nature by the day.

“My home is in a port city like Kochi. I grew up observing the power of water and weather in Baltic coast. Water is not something external, it’s in us. Water constantly circulates as vapour, rain, rivers, oceans, sewage systems, and as drinking water through our bodies. It connects all living beings. What happens to water happens to us,” said the Berlin-based visual artist beside her sculptural installation, Weathering with Me (2020 to ongoing), in Devassy Jose and Sons, Bazaar Road, Mattancherry.

Tübke began her bangaloREsidency in Kochi in 2019 for four weeks during the monsoon.

“Surrounded by water, I decided to focus on it. I visited the Kochi backwaters and spoke with fishermen and people of all ages and occupations about the impact of water and weather, especially during monsoon, on them and their surroundings, and about the floods that devastated Kerala in 2018,” she said.

Unfortunately, she could not exhibit her work owing to the pandemic in 2020. “After returning to Germany, I continued these conversations remotely through Jith Joseph in Kochi and together with field recordings from Kochi and its backwaters became part of the installation in December 2025,” she added.

Her work comprises a network of thin copper pipes that remind one of many systems in the body and pipe systems outside. While some end into funnel-like openings, others are fixed to the wall and floor. Viewers can hear sounds of backwaters, discern music of nature, of sea, of birds, as they keep their ears to two openings, and the conversation of the people in the other two.

Water flows through a pipe into the funnel at the end of a pipe below. Embedded in copper bowls, sun-dried Pokkali soil from the depths of the backwaters forms another part of the installation; partly carved into polygons in a bowl and in different stages of drying in the other four catching the bright sunlight and revealing artistic lines and textures shaped by sun’s heat.

The human voices are connected to the water flowing through the pipe and soil overhead, entangled at concrete and abstract levels in mundane life, often overlooked.

She depicts the transformative potential of the materials; how water can reactivate the soil to its fertile state. Each material is symbolic -- earth, water, copper and human connections can be interpreted at many levels, metaphorically.

“For Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025, I wanted to make these local experiences of water and weather audible and to connect people through them. I was fascinated by the oldest indigenous sustainable way of Pokkali paddy cultivation and aquaculture that a fisherman explained. He said Pokkali was a climate change and saline-resistant rice variety grown in brackish areas influenced by fresh water and saline water flowing from the Arabian Sea during tidal flooding, increasing these days owing to climate change,” Tubke said.

“Traditionally, rice cultivation alternates with aquaculture, mainly shrimp. Before the monsoon, small earthen mounds are made in the backwaters to let monsoon rains wash away its salinity after which paddy is grown on it and I have used this soil for my work,” she explained.

Moreover, the soil is used to build paths and sluices to control water flow for alternate farming enriching the connection between them.

Tübke depicts the generative power of water. Though water takes on various forms and shapes, and flows in various directions, it is a collaborator in her work. More than highlighting environmental issues, she wants to share Kochiites’ experiences with water, especially after the 2018 floods.

ENDS
 

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