From Zeynep Deniz Çalişkan

15th October - 25th December 2025

As a working artist living and working in the metropolis, it felt good to have a calm working environment in one of the most beautiful places in Switzerland for two months after a chaotic city. 

I didn't go with an idea in my head, I wanted to decide what to work on based on my experience there. In my work, I focus on the forms of the city and everyday life. I am interested in random and conscious choices, temporary structures that come together spontaneously and situations under construction. Since I mainly work with found materials in my practice, I didn't know what to do in the first days of my arrival, but Trelex is a very inspiring place. The studio is quite big and modular, which makes the working process very comfortable. It was also very enjoyable to share the studio with Nina from time to time.

The huge garden of the house was a great source of inspiration for me. On the first day of my arrival, the image of a large number of fireflies surrounding the cabin, which I encountered in the garden while making a tour, formed the basis of my work. I started to think about the relationship of these insects with space and the environment. I think of space as a living organism. It attracted my attention that there were so many that they covered the cabin on a sunny day and almost completely disappeared on a cloudy day. Thinking about these relationships and approaching them as if they were artifacts from an archaeological site, I started making my own insects out of clay. The concrete, fragile structure of clay combined with my intention to capture temporary and variable elements in a physical form. I worked on a site-specific work in which I made many small sculptures consisting of ghostly or shell-like structures and arranged them around the cabin. 

While working on these, I was also fascinated by the cables covering the studio and started to make drawings in various colours. The work stands out as a research that questions the boundaries of organisation and disorder and makes visible the autonomy of materials. The irregularity of the cables on the floor emphasises the technical infrastructure of the flow of electricity and its internal dynamics independent of human control. Likewise, the fluid structure of the cables, strips and the organisation of the floor creates a sense of spatial resistance and mobility. I think that these elements create an aesthetic tension that contradicts the normativity represented by the normative means of regulation. While my work has a more industrial, gray and pale aesthetic, I think I was influenced by Nina's multi-layered and colourful art practice and entered a colourful field. I am grateful for this as it created a different space in my mind.