Rebekka Homann

THE CYCLE --- A social dynamic that feels like a contract        




It begins with a strong feeling of duty and responsibility. In response to this, you start to fulfill your perceived duty, which takes the form of physical and mental work. Physical labour as a gift to those you love. Consequently, the ideas of love and work get closer, so much so that they start to fade into one another. Resentment starts to build for what and who you love. As you cannot bear resenting the object of your affection, you start to feel guilty – the guilt feeds into the feeling of duty and responsibility. Work becomes a way to solve your own guilt, to atone for the resentment and to perform your duty. You will not know what it all started with - - Since I can remember, a lot of my values and priorities in life have derived from a sense of duty and responsibility; the most formative part of it was taking care of two old and sick horses during my teenage years. Feeling responsibility gave me a sense of purpose, feeling needed. It also gave me feelings of resentment and, in response to that, guilt. 

In my artistic work, I am continually trying to untangle these dynamics. 





I am very interested in the psychology of work and how it influences my interpersonal relationships and self-worth. This seeps into my work regarding both its content and my relationship to making. At times, it feels like I am taking care of my work rather than making it, as I deliberately keep choosing labour-intensive media, like 3D-animation, video games and sculptures that consist of different materials and parts.

To date, one of my most important work surrounding these topics is the video installation Feed the horses (2022)¹.



¹note from 2026: this was true in 2024 at the time the text was written; judging from now, later works like Labour of Love (2025) feel more up to date and relevant.  In this work, I digitally rebuilt the environment the aforementioned horses lived in, as well as one of the horses. The digital environment and the horse developed into 3D-animated videos that were part of a larger video installation. The monitors the videos were displayed on were embedded in concrete sculptures I had cast, weighing approximately 300kg and propped up on stones and at a wall. Another part of the installation were two Thuja trees and 7 Thuja tree seedlings, planted into an additional concrete basin and one of the sculptures that held the monitors.

Caretaking on several levels:
1; My relationship to the horses as a caretaker
2; Taking care of a memory by rebuilding it and therefore taking up space for it
3; Taking care of the plants that became part of the work.

             
                   


















In relation to these topics, I have become increasingly interested in the writings and philosophy of Simone Weil, particularly her concept of Gravity and Grace.
According to her, “two forces rule the universe: light and gravity”. While she describes gravity as ruling all “the natural movements of the soul”, a force of descending motion that works analogous to physical gravity, grace is the only exception, a form of supernatural love, an ascending motion.
Gravity rules what we expect from others vs what we receive from them. To access grace is only possible when you are detached from gravity.
I first read about Simone Weil in “Aliens&Anorexia” by Chris Kraus, where Kraus assembles a philosophy of sadness and weakness through introducing the work of Simone Weil, as well as the artist Paul Thek.


I reencountered Kraus and Weil in an essay called “Becoming weak: Aesthetics of the feeble existence” by Kathrin Busch.
In the essay, Busch talks about weakness as a liminal space in between power and powerlessness.  

The realm of weakness offers possibilities for both extremes, being overpowered or completely overpowering. She goes on to talk about how next to the desire for empowerment, there exists an equal desire for disempowerment. I was struck by reading about this; the desire for disempowerment, how I imagine it, comes from a desire to escape from the burden of agency, that puts you in the possibility to become guilty of doing something bad; “I involve myself inexorabily in guilt”. At the same time, fantasizing about complete disempowerment doesn’t free you from your responsibility you have through having agency; instead, it makes it all the more visible.

The aesthetics of fragile existence want to show a self that is split in itself






The materiality of my work heavily connects to and leans on the dichotomy of heaviness and lightness. I am drawn to heavy/industrial materials from traditionally more masculine coded spheres (concrete, stone, steel, tech). I treat these materials with a lot of sensibility and contrast the heaviness with vulnerable topics. This produces situations of balance and tension, similar to the inner tension experienced in the described cycle of labour and guilt.
An artist that I have been very influenced by in regard to artistically working with these topics is the sculptor Berlinde de Bruyckere. I discovered her work in 2020, when I was living and studying as an exchange in Brussels. In January 2021, not knowing she had a show there at that time, I went to the Middelheim sculpture park in Antwerp and encountered her work “Onschuld kan een hel zijn”, Flemish for “Innocence can be a hell”, in one of the pavilions at the park. 


The installation consists of three large structures, made from wood and metal, that hold a manifold of different woolen blankets. Each of the blankets has a ribbon sown all the way around the edges that carries the title of the work on it.
In another pavilion of the park, an archive of images she had collected that influence her was shown and an interview with her was screened. In that interview, which I have since listened to several times, she talks about the ambiguity inside her work; for example in the form of the blanket that she uses as material and symbol, which she recalls comes from her childhood, where a blanket in her fathers car would either be used by her to snuggle up with on the backseat or to cover up a dog that they had hit with their car.


What was striking to me about this was how her work dealt with questions of guilt and responsibility; “Innocence can be a hell” referring to human inaction, which may be read as innocence, but can feel like paralyzing powerlessness. She talks about the feeling of trying to help others but ultimately feeling like it is never enough, and how this feeling turns into an existential guilt; trying to make small gestures, to smother the guilt, to fill a big void, but ultimately never succeeding. Her work, to me, speaks to a huge sadness felt within that dynamic, but on another level, to a commitment to try and make sense of it, to work through and communicate this feelings, or as she puts it: “I can offer these sculptures to help or comfort other people”. Her work is informed by a deep belief in the power of sculpture to actually bring about change, if people are open to deal with their own questions and needs when confronted with the meaning of a sculpture.








Even though my work is not and has never been purely sculptural, there is an emotionality I feel most obviously in making sculptural work that I carry into everything I make: Bringing something into the world, the belief that it should exist.
Digital work in animation and games as an extension of analogue space, as a means to communicate. Visualizing an internal space and state and working it into existence. Charging an artwork with emotion through the time spent working on it. Digital and physical work being dependent on one another as well as carrying dynamics of dependence within themselves: An installation with its parts so entertwined it cannot be called an installation, but instead becomes a single sculpture. All parts of it depending on each other.
Whether in digital or physical state, something I am always concerned with is making work that is alive, pulsating, but equally important: Keeping the work alive by caring for it. Making work that survives its separation from me.