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![Whispering bodies: scores for the we]( "Whispering bodies: scores for the we")
infoPerformance that tells a story about the search for collectivity, the joys and frictions of shaping a ‘collective body’, visualizing the intangible relations.
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![Risking entanglement]( "Risking entanglement")
infoA site-specific installation and training ground where we exercise interdependence and rehearse ‘suspension’, not as a way of escaping modernity but as a method of resistance)
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![Garden of suspension]( "Garden of suspension")
infoSpatial design of the garden to slow down, rest and repair. Suspension bridge that connects room and garden through the window.
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![Whispering bodies: scores for the we]( "Whispering bodies: scores for the we")
infoPerformance that tells a story about the search for collectivity, the joys and frictions of shaping a ‘collective body’, visualizing the intangible relations.
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Video work proposing a workshop in water with astronauts for the ASE Planetary Gathering. Film credits: Yavor Minchev
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![Mother-of-Oil]( "Mother-of-Oil")
infoProps for a lecture performance about shells and Shell.
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![Mother-of-Oil]( "Mother-of-Oil")
infoLecture performance about the colonial history of oil extraction in Indonesia.
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![Mother-of-Oil]( "Mother-of-Oil")
infoRelational map presenting the visual research about the entanglement of Royal Dutch Shell, VOC and shell trade on a light table.
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![How on Earth?!]( "How on Earth?!")
infoVideo work pitching a workshop in water with astronauts for the ASE Planetary Gathering.
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![How on Earth?!]( "How on Earth?!")
infoVideo work pitching a workshop in water with astronauts for the ASE Planetary Gathering.
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![Unearthed]( "Unearthed")
infoAuditive installation presenting more-than-human perspectives on geo-engineering.
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![Unearthed]( "Unearthed")
infoFuture fossil presenting more-than-human perspectives on geo-engineering.
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![Typographic Herbarium]( "Typographic Herbarium")
info4 part silkscreen series presents the symbiotic typeface »Graphis Scripta«. Each design of the »Typographic Herbarium« highlights a different aspect of the typeface, and visually bridges the themes of ecological mourning and lichen through the use of variable font styles.
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![Solastalgic stone]( "Solastalgic stone")
infoCommemorative stone with engraving reading »Solastalgie«. Solastalgia is the feeling of homesickness due to environmental changes although one is still at home.
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![Workshop on ecological grief and lichen]( "Workshop on ecological grief and lichen")
infoTwo-part workshop that familiarized participants with lichen and facilitated conversations about climate emotions.
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![Rememberance Day of Lost Species]( "Rememberance Day of Lost Species")
infoPoster for a workshop on ecological grief and lichen, facilitated on the Day of Lost Species 2022.
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![Moving words: a body glossary]( "Moving words: a body glossary")
infoVideo essay that researches how meaning is created through the body, becoming an archive of the research process and gestures that hold us together.
Carmen Draxler is a visual researcher and designer with a deep conviction for collective repair.
Her practice moves between art and design to tell affective stories that critically investigate the entanglements of coloniality, capital, and climate change. Through visual research, performance, and collective practices she engages with climate emotions, feminist ecology and the impacts of oil infrastructure. She researches the alienating causes and conditions of the Anthropocene and uses visual storytelling figures that challenge dominant narratives to create spaces for meaningful connection and radical care.
She is part and co-founder of the research-based artistic collective TogetherTogether. She is an alumni of Non-linear Narrative at the KABK in The Hague and holds a bachelor's degree in Visual Communication from Bauhaus University in Weimar. She has studied and worked in Germany, Canada and The Netherlands.
Websites
Research-based artistic collective on the intersecion of visual art, performance, and social work, driven by the need of resisting the alienation of living in an individualistic society.
togethertogether.space/Social media
Member of Artists’ Initiative/Collective/Incubator
TogetherTogether Collective
Member of a professional association/artists’ association
Typografische Gesellschaft München
Curriculum vitae
Education
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2025 - 2025Choreography School for New Dance Development
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2023 - 2025Non-linear Narrative Den Haag, Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten diploma
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2020 - 2021Performance and Design Concordia University Montreal
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2018 - 2023Visual Communication Bauhaus University Weimar diploma
exhibitions
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2025Graduation Show 2025 Royal Acadamy of Arts The Hague, Netherlands During the graduation show 2025, a spatial installation, performance, video essay, and workshops presented the research project »Practical proposals of what-might-be« on collectivity, interdependence, and suspension. It was the first time a collective of five graduates presented one unique graduation work at KABK. graduation.kabk.nl/2025/carmen-draxler Group
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2024Archival F(r)ictions National Archive The Hague, Netherlands Group exhibition showing archival research projects that trace, question and shift colonial narratives encoded in maps and cartography. »Mother-of-Oil« was presented as lecture performance and auditive installation. Collaboration with Nationaal Archief, Den Haag. issuu.com/kabk/docs/_unmapping_territories_-_master_non_linear_narrat Group
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2024On Sustainability and Regenerative Education Royal Acadamy of Arts The Hague, Netherlands Group
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2024Undercover Royal Acadamy of Arts The Hague, Netherlands Group show in the framework of the Second General Assembly at KABK, presenting the lecture performance »Mother-of-Oil« and material samples of plant dyes. Students, management and staff gathered to discuss the responsibility of artistic practices in times of multiple crises, demanding institutional commitment to ecological care. Group
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2024Conference on lichenology Havraníky, Czech Republic Group show on the socio-political effects of (technological) infrastructures. Exploring journalistic methods to visually research carbon migration, the auditive spatial installation »Unearthed« critically traced corporate narratives around climate solutions. Group
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2023Entanglements T12 Weimar, Germany Solo exhibition presenting the design research project »Entanglements« on ecological grief and lichen. The exhibition hosted fluorescent lichen prints in a dark room, a stone carving showcasing a symbiotic typeface, process pieces, and presentations. Solo
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2022Growing Materials University Library Weimar, Germany Group
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2022Den Haag Public Space Weimar, Germany Solo exhibition presenting 10 typographic posters in public space that challenge prejudices against gender-sensitive language. The interactive installation empowers people to actively confront linguistic discrimination and shows that it is in our hands to change language. Collaboration with Diversity Office, Bauhaus University. The Hague Solo
Projects
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2025
Practical Proposals of What-Might-Be Royal Academy of the Art, The Hague Practical Proposals of What-Might-Be, Netherlands graduation.kabk.nl/2025/carmen-draxler As artists and researchers, we are often asked to define an individual practice. But what happens when the practice is collective? »Practical proposals of what-might-be« responds to a society shaped by modernity and coloniality, where individualism is prioritized. In this context, coming together is a politicized experience for which we propose a language that suspends our belief and involvement in exploitative structures. The project exhibits an ongoing research into collective care through public gatherings and interventions, and unfolds in three interconnected pieces, a site-specific installation, a performance and a video essay. This project is both a proposal and a question: a space where we suspend productivism, reclaim agency, imagine futures, and ask what if? Collective work of TogetherTogether.
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2025
Collective Repair—Stitiching a Social Fabic of Care Royal Academy of the Art, The Hague The Hague, Netherlands 2024 »Stitching a Social Fabric of Care« is master thesis about collective repair as a form of community care. In conversation with repairers from Spinozahof and the Feminist Needlework Party, I researched the character of the social relations that emerge from the manual act of repairing objects together, expanding the notion of repair beyond the material layer. Through recorded conversations and feminist theories, I describe collective repair as an ethical framework of care and examine its potential to bridge difference, social alienation and polarization by building lasting connections and encouraging embodied learning. Collective repair contributes to sustainable, self-organized communities as it fosters mutual support and reclaims participation which challenges hierarchical structures and envisions care as a central organizing principle in society; gesturing towards commoning. The thesis is accompanied by an audio piece documenting the recorded conversations, and a series of photographs zooming-in on the manual labour and collective care of repair.
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2024
Mother-of-Oil Nationaal Archief The Hague, Netherlands »Mother-of-Oil« is a research project that traces the colonial roots of the Dutch-British oil company Shell. By following the stories of seashells from Indonesia, the audio-visual installation displays a relational map of archival material that reveals Shell's entanglement with the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Like tulips, seashells were highly coveted commodities in the 17th century that captivated many wealthy Europeans and became a symbol of power and prestige—a symbol that is now the logo of the global oil empire Shell. Before extracting oil, Shell's predecessors sold trinket boxes adorned with seashells from the Indo-Pacific. By reimagining a seashell box as carrier bag for displaced landscapes and distorted images, »Mother-of-Oil« seeks to disrupt colonial narratives and highlight how the commodification of marine life became a template for fossil capitalism. The work is activated through lecture performance.
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2024
How on Earth?! European Space Agency The Hague, Netherlands By floating in water, we invite astronauts and space dreamers to drift beyond the constraints of colonial imagination. The video work extends a call to the European Space Agency (ESA) to join us in a pool where floating becomes a method for caring space ethics—as a chance to reimagine our place in the cosmos and build futures on more humble and caring relations. Through performance, movement and conversation, floating and weightlessness, we seek to escape the technological imaginary that have shaped the planetary and extraterrestrial exploration. The video work experiments with storytelling for a feminist speculative fiction of space. It is a reminder that space is not a blank canvas for human ambition but a shared environment. The video work was developed during the Moonshot ‘24 programme of ESA to propose a workshop on space ethics with astronauts for the next ASE Planetary Gathering. Collective work of the AstroHydroFeministSuperWitches.
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2024
Unearthed Royal Academy of the Art, The Hague The Hague, Netherlands With »Unearthed« we look at the Dutch geoengineering project PORTHOS at the Port of Rotterdam. As a quick-fix for climate change, existing oil pipelines are currently transformed into an infrastructure to compress carbon emissions from port industries into the sandstone of depleted oil fields offshore. This technology is known as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). Regarded as an inevitable tool by the Dutch government to meet national climate goals, we ask who really profits from this expensive and short-lived technology. To bring the capitalist agenda of the project into view, »Unearthed« maps the public discourse around CCS and gives voice to the more-than-human realm. On a site of speculative archeology, visitors can listen to the stories of three future fossils that challenge human exceptionalism and surface our deep entanglements with the North Sea. Collective work with Laura Flethe.
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2023
Entanglements Bauhaus University Weimar, Germany »Entanglements« is a design research project that aims to visualise the climate emotion of ecological grief. To understand the complex grief experienced in response to environmental losses, »Entanglements« looks at the remarkable life of lichen, offering inspiring teachings of the possibility of species coexisting symbiotically on a damaged planet. The parallels between lichen and ecological grief offer an emotional approach to the climate crisis and reveal new scopes for action. On this journey into a new epoch , the Symbiocene, we are accompanied by the eco-psychological reader »Kriecht« that serves as an experimental toolkit to understand climate emotions. Additionally to the reader, the research project encompasses a workshop, a process book, the typeface »Graphis Scripta« presented on stone and biofluorescent prints—all of which was brought together in a solo exhibition.
International exchanges/Residencies
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2024Floating University Berlin Berlin, Germany Artistic residency within the second round of the »Free Radicals« programme at the open-air Floating Learnscapes. Directed towards self-organised student groups to implement interdisciplinary practices or research outside the walls of institution, and engage with pressing matters of our times: notions of ecologies, solidarity, political and social engagement as well as care for ourselves and our surroundings. Participated as part of Strudeling Collective. floating-berlin.org/programmes/learnscapes/ls-24/free-radicals-2024/
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2024Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes Colditz, Germany Summer school in literature and sociology researching »The Improbability of the End«. We address the social and aesthetic issues of endings, closures and cessations that have been at the heart of the crises of recent years: Think of the ›end‹ of the pandemic, capitalism and globalization as well as the inevitable depletion of natural resources. Using current and historical examples, we research the question of why it is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.
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2023BlackStar Studios Inveremere, Canada Worked as graphic designer and sales manager for the gallery and art studio BlackStars.
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2022Burg Giebichenstein https://www.burg-halle.de/artikel/a/artistic-research-forschen-an-dingen, Germany Residency on design and artistic research. Artistic research assigns an immanent knowledge to the world of things, whether everyday objects or works of art. In the work group on »The knowledge of things« facilitated by Anja Neidhardt we ask if design products are also traces of cognitive processes. What then is the role of design research? How does a research-oriented design practice expand traditional paradigms in design? Can critical design research bring emancipatory potential to the design museum? www.burg-halle.de/artikel/a/artistic-research-forschen-an-dingen
Publications
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2025Graphis Scripta Book Slanted Publishers Scholarship for students in the fields of Art Karlsruhe, Germany www.slanted.de/product/slanted-experimental-type-3-0/
reviews
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2021Student's Public Poster Installation Highlights Gender-Inclusive Language Website Weimar, Germany www.uni-weimar.de/en/university/structure/central-university-facilities/equal-opportunity-office/newsletter-archive/texte-newsletter/summaery-2021-students-public-poster-installation-highlights-gender-inclusive-language/
Awards and grants
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2023Scholarship for students in the fields of Art Stipendium der Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes Weimar, Germany Scholarship that supported artistic practice throughout education
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2020Mobility-enhancing scholarship DAAD - German Academic Exchange Service Weimar, Germany Grant that supported a half year academic exchange to Canada