Is it confusing? Yes, it is confusing.

Sometimes I place my forehead on a loved one‘s forehead and I‘m sure that we are thinking the same—not thinking the same thing—but thinking things with the same materiality.

I wonder if the eggs in the bird‘s nest feel the same when they lay next to each other, like bald heads, their white skulls touching. If eggshells side by side are a state of silently communicating a life-death feeling. Air can‘t pass through the shell and enter, but air has to exit—or the egg inside the shell will rot. I wonder if the world seeps into the eggs as words and noise and they exhale it back to us. No egg looks the same, but in our collective mind, there’s a standardized perfect ideal for everything.

In the apartment complex I grew up in, we lived in piles and stacks of boxes, and my box had the same floor plan as all the other boxes in our building and in the ten other big building blocks on the street. Every box fit together in bleak grey and beige stacks of towers. I found out later that in a Swedish building complex, built after the same design as my boxes but with even cheaper materials, asbestos filled the walls and fell like snowflakes or fish food through the cracks and into the mouths and nostrils of its inhabitants, embedding them in the architecture itself. Marking them as the property of their homes and making them sick.

Apartment complexes feel like dollhouses and library shelves and boxes unfolded like a two-dimensional recipe.

Cadastre is a register, a list or a collection of things or facts describing something spatial. The real estate cadastre is the register of all parcels of land, and the parcels are described with their location, type of use, geometry, and the buildings located on the parcel. In the world of Coco Schütte’s works, property mutates into something shippable—where parcel post and residential parcel are equated.

In KATASTER, wooden boxes with the measurements of a DHL-sized “M” parcel are stacked into gridded bodily structures, like high-rise dollhouses that offer glimpses into the contents of their stomachs. Each box, identical in its dimensions, holds the potential of a life—a standardized container for the good idea of living. A person‘s clothes, like a second skin tailored to a prescribed size, simulate individuality but are bound to the logic of mass production. The material of the house doesn’t only shelter its inhabitants—it also absorbs them and metabolizes them. If a house is a living thing, its walls inhale its residents until there is no longer a boundary between home and body. A house is like a pregnant egg—holding the promise of life while incubating its own decay. A life-death state.

Standardization as a strive for perfection is a collective illusion.

There is always someone cheating with the recipe.

Sometimes it all feels very universal.

—Karoline Franka Foldager, 2025

Coco Schütte, born in 1994 and based in Berlin, studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. She has exhibited her work in various group and solo exhibitions across Europe. Recent exhibitions include “Conditions of a necessity” at Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2021), “Apparition en haute altitude” at Galerie Droite Gauche, Paris (2022), and “Kiss your Darlings” at Åplus Galerie, Berlin (2024).

Coco Schütte explores how predetermined structures influence our understanding of space, identity, and community. Through subtle interventions in everyday objects, she highlights the tension between individual needs and standardized architectural grids, revealing how social norms shape our lives and perceptions of privacy.

One of the works features eight doormats made of coconut fibres arranged in a closed circle. This piece symbolizes threshold spaces within the city where anonymity and community coexist. The doormat, an everyday object on the boundary between the outside and inside, transforms into a collective yet inaccessible space that blurs individual identity.

Another series of objects addresses the standardization of living spaces. Schütte creates modular cells using standard DHL M boxes. The screen print on the stamp on one of these boxes, which shows Mies van der Rohe’s Lake Shore Drive Apartments, is used here as a reference for the introduction of modern, serial architecture in residential buildings. A lipstick placed between the inside and outside of the open box symbolizes breaking free from the uniformity of our living environments and overall the societal expectations, especially of women. Outdated but entrenched role models for women are a central theme in Schütte’s work in general. She tackles social expectations, ranging from motherhood as an assumed fulfilment, the need to conform to existing structures as a prerequisite for social acceptance, or the demand for a well-maintained appearance as an unspoken norm, just to name some. A significant symbol is the book “Bosses” by conceptual artist Ghislaine Leung, which is affixed to one of the works and punctured by a shoe heel.

Using second-hand duvets sourced from eBay classifieds, she creates another object that, when inflated by fans, suggests a physical presence without revealing an actual body. These everyday items not only highlight the limitations of living spaces but also evoke memories and longings materialized in seemingly mundane objects.

Through her work, Schütte visualizes the invisible frameworks that dictate our living conditions and movements in space. She examines the delicate balance between standardization and individuality, privacy and publicity, architecture and the body.

—Verana Osthoff, 2025