Neither Water Nor Land

MAJ VAN DER LINDEN and Wohnen AM TACHELES are pleased to present Neither Water Nor Land, a solo exhibition by Berlin-based artist duo Studio Jumi. Working at the intersection of art, craft, and design, Julia Buntzel and Miriam Rose Gronwald transform traditional handweaving techniques by drawing unconventional, often discarded materials into textile works that are at once tactile, contemplative, and ecologically minded.

The exhibition takes its name from the ambiguous character of peatlands — ancient, layered environments caught between water and land, living and dead, preservation and decay. Once dismissed as mystical wastelands, these landscapes are now understood as the planet's largest natural carbon store, and among its most fragile. Studio Jumi translates this tension into woven form: surfaces become sites where the organic and the synthetic, the traditional and the contemporary are held together in deliberate contradiction.
The handwoven paintings, set in raw steel frames, provide a format for examining the conflicting forces within our environment, where natural materials intersect with non-degradable, human-made debris. Discarded bicycle tubes are entwined into the strict architecture of warp and weft alongside natural fibres of cotton, wool, and silk, placing industrial waste within a dialogue of opposing material tensions. The beauty of the work paradoxically emerges from these scars of disruption, raising the question of how ancient craft knowledge might regain significance in a moment of urgent environmental change.

Where rubber meets fibre, textures tell the story. The works carry the traces of their materials: faded manufacturer names, patches, the irregular geometry of hand-cut tubing against the softness of plant-based thread. These contrasts are not incidental — they are the subject. In joining disparate, often opposing elements into a coherent whole, weaving becomes both method and metaphor.
Underlining the series of works that take on the form of archaic human activity is Studio Bergob's steel bench Chaise 'Too' Lounge, its raw, industrial material resonating with Studio Jumi's play of the artefact in a future archaeology. A bespoke scent composition, developed in collaboration with Dr Caroline McMillan, accompanies the exhibition, adding an atmospheric layer to Studio Jumi's exploration of memory, materiality, and transformation.

Neither Water Nor Land is representative of Studio Jumi's practice, one that moves fluidly between ecological reflection, material investigation, and formal experimentation — proposing that honest responses to environmental complexity might begin, simply, with the act of making.