Kombucha

Lucia Koch uses photography to explore the boundaries of architecture. In her playful Fundos series (2001–ongoing), the artist photographs the insides of empty boxes, creating disorienting and uncanny images that resemble life-size rooms. Instead of turning the box into a house, she explores how the box is already a house.

Playing with notions of perspective, once these images are hung on a wall, they seem to allow for an extension of the space they exist in. Koch also experiments with scale, where the typically small becomes enormous and seems to become inhabitable, raising the question of what turns space into place and uproots the norms that dictate our spatial expectations and experiences.

The initial inspiration for the series come from Koch’s personal experience: "When I had my own apartment for the first time, I almost had no furniture, so I used piled up cardboard boxes to keep my stuff, like a shelf. I found myself looking at them a lot. At the time I was making videos and I had this insight: that video turned everything flat, and I wanted to use that lack of depth. I kept thinking of making images of the bottoms of cans, bottles and boxes".