Valentina Karga

Valentina Karga, born in Chalkidiki, Greece, is an artist and architect based in Berlin. Valentina’s projects encourage engagement and participation, facilitate practices of commoning and are concerned with sustainability. Working across different media and inviting the public or community groups to complete the work, one can say that Valentina’s work lays somewhere between conceptual art, architecture and socially engaged practice. Sometimes, through dialogue and building prototypes in a DIY manner, they end up imagining alternatives for societal structures, such as economic and pedagogic institutions. They then put these self-proclaimed institutions and infrastructures into practice, so that they construct lived experiences of alternative conditions or courses of action. This is what she calls ‘Art as Simulation’. Valentina believes that Art as Simulation has the potential to free us from limited views on what is possible and, in this way, to expand our reality. In Saari, taking climate change as the starting point, she is working on a video essay which involves cases of institutions and practices that do not work any longer. She is trying to understand why we refuse to see that, and what is the next step after critique.