The Commons

Public art project: text-based public sculpture installations, 2020-

The Commons is a poetic and provocative campaign in public spaces encouraging reflection on the nature of shared spaces, site-specific and evolving over time.

Societies are created in public spaces; they form a topography of social and political participation. The Commons began in 2020, through a temporary public art commission from the City of Munich, with a custom campaign for commercial billboards and online platforms. This first series questioned the commercial use of shared, public space and - particularly relevant during those times of pandemic restrictions and shifting priorities - highlighted the manifold importance of public green space. Do the public spaces we inhabit reflect our priorities, realities, and values -- and how could public space be transformed for social good?

The project subsequently expanded into a series and was shown again as temporary interventions in Munich in winter 2020/21, in Los Angeles in early 2022, and in both Munich and Duesseldorf in summer 2024.

The first permanent public sculpture installation of The Commons was unveiled in the Schussenpark, Ravensburg in September, 2025. The nine text sculptures in powder-coated aluminium, under the title Ein Liebesbrief an oeffentliche Gruenflaechen (A Love Letter to Public Green Spaces), merge seamlessly with the landscape architecture of the park in an homage to intermingled living in shared spaces.

Most recently, in summer 2026, a monolithic permanent sculpture The Commons: WE BREATHE IN WHEN PLANTS BREATHE OUT was installed in the public sculpture garden on the Insel Grafenwerth, an island in the Rhine River at Bad Honnef, near Bonn, thanks to a commission by the Kummer-Vanotti Stiftung and their Environment and Art Award. This large-scale, powder-coated steel sculpture is a monument to interspecies mutualism and the inextricable embeddedness of human life within more-than-human netowrks.