»We were both completely calm and shared the same body temperature.«

Interview with Susi Gelb

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Susi Gelb, Reptile shelter, Photo: Robert Fischer

Susi Gelb and the Stadler family have been close friends for many years. Through numerous encounters, studio visits and exhibition visits, a strong fascination developed for the consistency with which Susi Gelb explores the relationship between humans and nature in her work. She brings together materials, forms and elements that at first glance seem to belong to different worlds, creating her own distinctive cosmoses.

In the interview, Susi Gelb talks about how, already at the age of seven, she looked at the impact of humans on their environment with a kind of Weltschmerz – a subject that has stayed with her ever since. She speaks about what shapes her work and about the role nature plays not only in her art, but also in her everyday life.

A yellow python once swam in the Stadlers’ pool. What was that all about?

For the filming of no such things grow here, I was looking for a suitable pool that was warm enough and free of chlorine so that a python could swim in it. That's when the Stadler family's pool came to mind. We met there on a very hot summer day in 2017, and Lisa, a 3.5-metre-long albino python, was able to go for a swim for the first time in her life. I accompanied her with a GoPro camera. It was a special occasion for me as well, almost like a rite of passage. The resulting footage is truly mesmerizing: the shimmering turquoise water, the snake's yellow-and-white patterned scales, the reflections of the sun. The film and its storyboard are now part of the Stadler Collection, and the film premiered in the square in front of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich as part of my public art project.

Susi Gelb, no such things grow here, 2017, video still & installation view Public Art Projekt Max Joseph Platz Munich, 2017

What does the snake mean to you?

I had known Lisa since 2015, when I filmed full size original ∞ loading with her. One of the starting points for that film was how a snake, winding itself around me and clinging to my body, transformed my physicality and form. For the filming, I stood completely still for forty minutes while the tiger python moved freely around me. She wound herself around my body several times, wrapped herself around me, and gradually coiled her 350-centimetre-long body beneath my shirt. After about five minutes, I could feel our breathing synchronising. We were both completely calm and shared the same body temperature. It was a truly remarkable experience - deeply meditative. The snake is one of humanity's oldest symbols. While in Christianity it is often associated with temptation, in many other cultures it is regarded as a bringer of healing or salvation, from the bronze serpent of Moses to the serpent of Asclepius in ancient Greece. It also symbolises rebirth, fertility, wisdom, and a connection to the cosmos. In 2023, I produced a series of ceramic works depicting coiled snakes, inspired by Mesoamerican ritual objects. I also preserved Lisa's 350-centimetre-long shed skin from after the film shoot in the work ‘renaissance enquiry’.

Susi Gelb, Dawn 01 & Dawn 03, 2023, stoneware, volcanic glaze

You once said that a sense of Weltschmerz has been with you since your childhood. You grew up in Bad Tölz, surrounded by nature. Do you remember what first triggered that feeling?

I became aware of the vulnerability of ecological systems at an early age. The feeling that is often described today as ecological grief has been with me since I was about seven years old. Conversations at primary school about saving water or the environmental impact of cars, seeing a hedgehog that had been run over, or watching a tree being felled - even then, these experiences triggered deep reflection and a profound sense of despair in the face of ongoing environmental destruction. The realisation that everyday human actions contribute to ecological damage and exploitation has had a lasting impact on me. Through my artistic practice, I engage with this experience of ecological grief. We all live within an irresolvable tension between responsibility and negligence, between being informed and remaining naïve, a condition shaped by what van den Akker and Vermeulen describe in their book Metamodernism as ‘pragmatic idealism’.

So, the climate crisis is an emotional starting point for your art?

I experience the ecological crisis not merely as an external threat, but as an injury to the very system of which we ourselves are a part. This simultaneous experience of connectedness and loss, together with an awareness of our own limitations in the face of global climate change, forms a central point of departure for my artistic practice. I believe that art has the capacity to transform grief and ambivalence into spaces of possibility and hope. This transformative potential lies at the heart of my work.

Your Capri Battery Updates refer to Joseph Beuys' work of the same name. How did you come up with the idea of taking up this motif?

At the beginning of my art studies, I became interested in the subject of energy and came across a photograph of Joseph Beuys's Capri- Batterie, which I pinned to my wall. In early 2009, when I learned about the new EU regulation requiring incandescent light bulbs to be replaced with energy-saving bulbs, I spontaneously had the idea of applying this regulation to the Capri-Batterie. As Beuys's work was both socially critical and political, it seemed only logical to create a contemporary update of it. I was delighted that, while I was still a student, the work found such an enthusiastic audience among Beuys collectors. Joseph Beuys's original Capri-Batterie was created in 1985, the year I was born. It is based on the idea that lemons store energy and can in fact be used as simple batteries. While the electricity generated by a lemon is sufficient to power a small LED, it is not enough to illuminate the yellow light bulb in the original work, nor the energy-saving bulb in my version. It is precisely this imbalance between natural sources of energy and human energy demands that I see as a symbol of humanity's tendency to take more from nature than it can sustainably provide.

lieft: Susi Gelb, Capri-Batterie Asien-Standard (Update for Joseph Beuys), 2010, right: Capri-Batterie EU-Standard (Update for Joseph Beuys), 2009

In your work, materials such as clay, water and glass are combined with polyester resin, cables, steel and technical elements. How do these material combinations come about?

My work explores processes of transformation, fusion, and continual becoming. The material combinations embody a world in which ecology and technology have ceased to exist as separate spheres. The materials I use often possess contrasting qualities: some change in response to heat or cold, dry out, grow, or react to their surroundings, while others are designed for permanence and control. It is precisely these tensions that bring into focus questions about our relationship to the planet, to resources, to transformation, and to the systems we have created and destroyed. Many of my works also engage with precarity and fragility. I am less interested in the oppositions between soft and hard or organic and technological than in the relationships that emerge between materials. Earth, water, wood, resin, steel, and technical components each bring their own properties, resistances, and temporalities. In the process of making, I try not to fully control these inherent logics. This gives rise to constellations in which the materials themselves become active participants. I see this openness as a critique of traditional notions of mastery. The works become assemblages in which organic, technological, and human dimensions continuously shape one another.

What do the elements, and solid and ephemeral states, mean to you?

I once wrote down the sentence: "We live in an ocean of air." My casts revolve around processes of encasing, breaking open, and interpenetration; it is often unclear where the inside begins and the outside ends. I see this as a fitting image of our existence. Earth becomes dust and filters rainwater as it seeps through the ground, enriching it with minerals. We drink water, water evaporates, thunderstorms gather. In fact, everything is in motion - a vast metabolism.

That’s why I love working with water: Everything flows, including through our own bodies. It is easy to take this for granted, yet these are conditions of existence that deserve our attention. We breathe air, drink water, move through both, and exist within an atmosphere filled with particles filtered by trees and enriched with oxygen. We do not stand outside nature but participate in the same cycles of matter, down to the very core of our cells.

I am equally fascinated by scale: by the fact that microscopic, bodily, and planetary systems are all made up of complex processes held in a delicate balance.

above: Installation views: Susi Gelb, soft liquids hard shell, Kunstraum Konrad, 2024, Photo :Tobias Erhardt & installation view: Susi Gelb, Unsee, 2023, Nir Altman Galerie, Photos: Dirk Tacke, below: Susi Gelb, upstream (t) No. 12, 2014, Foto: Susi Gelb

For your work “upstream (t) no.12”, you cast the crown of a pineapple in resin. Could you tell us more about it?

The work refers to the human desire to preserve, archive, and control nature, while at the same time pointing to the limits of that endeavour. The resin creates an impression of permanence, yet natural processes cannot be fully controlled or brought to a halt. Living matter follows its own inherent logic.

When the pineapple was cast, it developed an unexpected golden shimmer that surprised even me. The work is part of a larger series which I see as an evolving archive. They do not organise the world according to scientific categories but instead develop a logic of their own. In this way, a distinct visual vocabulary – a kind of visual atlas – gradually emerges. Through variations and connections, a personal mythology slowly takes shape, in which materials, forms, and bodies continually enter into new relationships.

You have described your exhibitions as landscapes or small ecosystems. What role do visitors play within them?

My installations work through immersion. I always try to transform the atmosphere and perception of a space and to engage visitors on a sensory level. I am interested in whether rhythm and atmosphere can foster a sense of connectedness - with the works themselves, with other people, and with the non-human world. Visitors become part of a network of relationships and are reminded that there is no outside of nature. We are all part of one vast ecosystem.

Last year, you presented the exhibition Foundations are never mute at Archiv der Zukunft in Lichtenfels. What was the starting point for this exhibition?

For this exhibition, I worked intensively on the relationship between the human body, sculpture, video, architecture, and movement. Together with choreographer and dancer Edith Buttingsrud-Pedersen and musician Enyang, I developed a performance specifically for the project. My aim was to create an immersive environment in which sculptural and cinematic elements, the music, and the dancers' bodies envelop visitors and are experienced as something fluid. All of the elements unfold together and merge into one another, forming an interconnected whole. Certain forms recur throughout the exhibition, such as the vortex, an important motif in my work. The layering of space and the intersecting movements, together with the live music, create a sensual rhythm and a tactile energy that make the cold concrete core walls of the basement feel fleshy and alive, while the monumental glass surfaces on the ground floor begin to resemble warm skin. It is precisely this oscillation that fascinates me. Art has the power to radically transform its surroundings. Every work influences the appearance of those around it, reflects back on itself, and reshapes the relationships between visitors. It is not only the individual works that matter, but the interplay between them; a field in which questions of agency, repair, and corporeality are continuously negotiated and reconfigured.

Installation view: Susi Gelb, Foundations are never mute, 2025, Archiv der Zukunft Lichtenfels, Photos: Milena Wojhan

Which work has been a defining milestone for you, and why?

One project that immediately comes to mind is the installation Payback XS, which I realised in Mainburg in 2010. My class had been invited to develop projects in public space, and, thanks to a rather naïve determination, I managed within just a few days to install fourteen cars - obtained from a local scrapyard – upside down in the town's main parking lot. It was a punk gesture that I am still proud of. It was also a remarkable collaborative process made possible by the voluntary support of many people from the local community.

Another project that remains especially important to me is Enzyklopädie von S bis G, the publication accompanying my first solo exhibition, curated by Felix Gaudlitz. Working on that book felt like a liberating breakthrough: We sifted through an enormous archive of photographs, drawings, and notes, gradually distilling them into an artist's book that still feels highly relevant to me today. It marked the moment when many of the recurring themes and connections within my practice first became visible to me.

Installation views: Susi Gelb, Payback XS, 2010, Public Art Project, Mainburg

I've heard that you've created a garden in front of your studio apartment. Do you see it as part of your artistic practice, or is it simply leisure, a hobby?

For me, art is not a linear process but an ever-expanding network, and I find this reflected in the garden.

The garden has significantly deepened my engagement with perspective, plants, place, and time. I have also been exploring different concepts of gardening. A garden always reveals a worldview: do we seek to dominate nature, shaping it into something artificial that appears entirely under control - through short, fertilised lawns, geometric hedges - or do we allow for a wilder, more diverse environment, a more natural and romantic garden? And even then, how much do we intervene?

Our garden is a lush oasis that enriches my everyday life in Berlin. Every morning, the first thing I do is step outside and breathe in the air. I am fascinated by how just a few square metres of densely planted urban nature can produce the scent of blossoms, morning dew, coolness, and a sense of abundance. The different leaf shapes, colours, and growth patterns create an atmosphere all of their own. Thanks to the layered planting, the garden now feels much larger than it did before. It is equally fascinating how quickly it has become a habitat for other living beings. Bumblebees, wild bees, butterflies, and dragonflies fill the air, bats circle overhead in the evening, and at night even raccoons and foxes come to drink from the small water basin.

If technical, financial or physical constraints were no obstacle, what would you like to realise one day?

Off the coast of Brazil lies the island of Queimada Grande, home to venomous snakes, various reptiles, amphibians, and migratory birds. It is a protected nature reserve and cannot be entered. When I first read about the island, I immediately immagined installing a sculpture there - one dedicated exclusively to snakes.

Interview by Sophie Azzilonna

July 2026