Aya Koné

Having grown up in spaces that occupy the in-between, Aya Koné’s practice moves within sculpture, writing, and material research to explore distance as a condition. She examines how knowledge is fractured and reformed across displacement, cultural memory, and incomplete inheritances.

Drawing on themes of ritual, repair, disobedience, rhythm, and spirit, her work navigates the tensions between legibility and loss, tradition and translation. Materials such as mycelium, soil, rusted metal, and bioplastics become agents in this inquiry– living forms that metabolize trauma and care. A certain kind of grief.

Replication becomes a mode of negotiation, drawing from traditional objects and architectures to reflect shifting inheritances. Rooted in the process of indigenizing one’s practice, her work explores a language of distance: where forms mutate, mistranslate, and resist settling – rather than restoring tradition, her works trace its movement: what carries, what fragments, what reshapes itself.

During the residency, Aya aims to develop a series of works that revolve around migration, translation and water. Drawing from personal archives and the slow sludge of immigration bureaucracy, she will trace translation through processes such as crystallization: by, through, and with the water. It follows a phrase Aya encountered in a German integration course: “Ich bin nah am Wasser gebaut”, which literally translates “to be built close to the water” but comes closer to describe someone who cries a lot. Perhaps there lies possibility in being formed or calcified through water. Collecting these stories of migration and water, Aya will follow their translations into the languages of her family – languages that the artist never learned to speak. This series forms an attempt to begin to bridge that distance, probably finding oneself stranded, but nonetheless commencing to cross. The threads will gather in various processes, their remnants, and a larger traditional structure such as the foggara; holding, carrying or directing the flow of water.