Bocci Presents The Overview Effect at The Foundry in Berlin

30 September 2026

Some of the most radical changes in human perception begin with distance. Looking at Earth from space reduced a seemingly limitless world to a single, fragile image.

This transformation is at the heart of the “Overview Effect”, a term coined by writer and researcher Frank White to describe the cognitive shift experienced by astronauts when seeing Earth from beyond it. From that distance, political borders disappear and the planet becomes visible as one interconnected system.

It is this idea that forms the starting point for The Overview Effect, commissioned by Bocci and curated by Anna Carnick at The Foundry, Bocci’s space for art, design and culture in Berlin. Rather than approaching the concept literally, the exhibition uses it as a way to question how we relate to materials, ecosystems and one another.

Set within the industrial architecture of Wilhelm Hallen, the installation itself reinforces this sense of shifting perspective. Semi-transparent textile partitions divide the space without fully separating it, allowing works to appear, disappear and overlap as visitors move through the exhibition. The experience is less about looking at isolated objects than understanding the relationships between them.

This approach extends across the works on display. French designer Marlène Huissoud, for example, works with biological materials and processes linked to insects, transforming discarded silkworm cocoons and natural bio-resins into sculptural objects. Her practice challenges the conventional idea of nature as a passive resource, instead proposing a more collaborative relationship between design and living systems.

Artist and physician Marjolein Hessels offers another interpretation of this connection. In her embroidered depiction of Verbascum thapsus, the colours are extracted directly from the plant itself, collapsing the distinction between subject and material.

Elsewhere, South African artist and designer Christine Jacobs works with felted wool to translate the landscape of the Merino sheep farm where she grew up into tactile, enveloping structures. Within the hard surfaces of the former factory, these works introduce a sense of softness, memory and protection.

The exhibition intentionally resists a single visual language. Works by Tara Sakhi, Chmara.Rosinke, we+, Fernando Laposse, King Houndekpinkou, Lionel Jadot, Elisa Strozyk, Studio Furthermore, gt2P and others move across different disciplines, cultures and material approaches.

What connects them is not aesthetics but a shared attempt to reconsider relationships: between humans and nature, objects and environments, individuality and collective systems.

One of the exhibition’s clearest gestures comes from Chilean studio gt2P, whose installation invites visitors to answer the question: What is your hope for the future of the planet? Their responses accumulate within the work, turning a single object into a collective archive of expectations. It is a simple act, but one that brings the exhibition back from the planetary scale to the personal.

At a moment when borders often appear increasingly reinforced, The Overview Effect proposes a different point of view. Not one in which differences disappear, but one in which they are understood as part of something inevitably shared.

The Overview Effect is on view at The Foundry, by Bocci, Kopenhagener Str. 60–68, 13407 Berlin.

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