HydraUnit

INSTALLATION
2025 Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt, Kunsthalle Basel

Material: tomato plants, porcelain, plaster, resin, glass from display, hard foam, aluminum, threaded rods.

© Susi Hinz. Photos: David Berweger, Viswerk


HydraUnit approaches sculpture as a reproductive system. Taking the freshwater polyp Hydra as a biological model of persistence through division and regeneration, the work adopts a logic in which form is not imposed but generated through processes of material reconfiguration. Dried tomato plants, dipped in porcelain and mechanically bound, become hybrid structures whose morphology emerges from conversion rather than design. In the series LimbVault, this same procedure is applied to industrial matter: casts of AppleCare protective packaging are encased in porcelain and assembled into archaic structural forms. In HydraUnit – Pansoma and HydraUnit, Cryopan, sculpture does not present itself as a discrete object but as a self-propagating condition in which biological and technological systems converge and continue to unfold.