Interfacing the non- is a resistant gesture in the dominant narrative that divides nature/culture, digitality/humanity, technology and other materialities. The mixed-media installation builds on the artist's long-term research into cotton and its inextricable colonial entanglements in the phantasms of modernization, technological development, and the factor of production. In Interfacing the non-, the white cotton fabric from warp and weft is covered with a transparent layer of silicone that glistens on the surface. With the silicone cotton in the background, three hand choreographies on flatscreen monitors seem to reflect our everyday movements, and yet these persistent gestures manifest our being in progressive dimensions of time and space. The relations created here are searching transitions, formulating an unfinished self.

The work was first developed in 2018 for the exhibition “My grammar and your(s)?” at On Curating Project Space in Zurich and subsequently shown in the same form at the exhibition “Digital Ecologies” at the Center for Contemporary Art 'Ancient Bath' in Plovdiv (BL).







In 2019, Interfacing the non- was shown at Kunstkasten Winterthur at the invitation of Indian art critic Najrin Islam, who was writer in residence at Villa Sträuli in Winterthur at the time. Stefanie Knobel redesigned her installation for the space. Through its presence in public space on the square named after the manufacturer's wife, Katharina Sulzer, the installation’s time and space dimensions took on a new poignancy.