Sandra Knecht is a Swiss artist who works across media with relationships as her artistic material. At the heart of her practice lies the question of home and belonging: How does a sense of home emerge? What creates security, trust, and recognition—and what generates alienation? Her materials are people, bodies, food, smells, language, music, memories, spaces, animals, landscapes, and objects. Knecht brings them into relation with one another, creating situations in which something new can arise between them. Food and cooking are central artistic media in her work. Cooking is craft, ritual, and a form of translation: experiences, memories, places, and relationships are transformed into taste. At the same time, eating is always a social situation. Those who cook for others take on responsibility. Those who eat must trust. This mutual trust also carries risk: the outcome cannot be fully controlled. Knecht understands this approach as composition. She composes not only images or installations but also situations and constellations: Who comes together? What is shared? What is told, remembered, or left unspoken? What is eaten? What lies close together, and what remains separate? Where and when does a resonant space emerge? She also views her work as an expanded concept of direction. She selects people, materials, places, and actions, brings them into relation, and creates conditions under which something can happen. The direction does not determine the outcome; it provides a structure and takes responsibility for the process while leaving room for the unpredictable. In this way, her work becomes an experiment. Knecht initiates processes whose outcomes are not entirely foreseeable. The unpredictable is not a mistake but part of the work. Where people, bodies, materials, and relationships meet, there is always the possibility of failure. An encounter may not succeed, trust may be absent, a composition may not come together. This risk is inherent to the artistic process. The score can be understood as a tool of direction. It structures sequences, encounters, repetitions, pauses, and transitions without fully defining them. It creates a framework within which something can occur. From these situations, social sculptures emerge. They consist not only of the people themselves but of the constellations that form between people, things, bodies, places, landscapes, animals, actions, and memories. The social event is not a byproduct of the art but its material. In doing so, Knecht extends the concept of Soziale Plastik (Social Sculpture), focusing it on the concrete experience of belonging, alienation, decisions, and responsibility. Her work often begins with a personal experience but does not remain confined to biography.
