Submerge is emblematic of Anna Franke’s process—one that makes visible the methods and preoccupations that continue to shape her current work, including Mudar. While created in the waters of Costa da Morte in Galicia, Submerge is a procedural anchor: a work through which the artist reveals how her body, material, and landscape can act on one another.
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What emerges in Submerge is a way of working that is neither sculptural nor performative alone. Fabric becomes an instrument for registering movement, friction, and environment. Sea-water, minerals, and sediment inscribe themselves into the textile, turning it into a witness—one that carries the record of force, drift, and duration. The resulting forms, with their folds and labyrinthine surfaces, are not objects of representation; they are documents of an encounter.
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This is why Submerge operates as a conceptual hinge for her practice within the Down the Rabbit Hole pavilion. It illuminates Franke’s commitment to material processes that are slow, embodied, and open-ended. It also contextualises her interest in thresholds: between human and non-human agencies, between intentional gesture and environmental accident, between making and being made.
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Placed here, Submerge does more than offer a past work. It clarifies the lineage of Mudar—where salt, touch, sound, and the idea of the body as a transitional zone become central. The move from ocean to salt mine is not a shift in theme but a deeper entry into the same inquiry: how materials can store transformation, how the body can operate as both instrument and interface, and how art can inhabit the unstable space between presence and erasure.
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If Mudar looks toward Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ«’s concept of the barzakh—an interval between states—Submerge shows how Anna’s practice had already been working inside this space. It demonstrates how she learns from environments by submitting materials to them, allowing natural forces to shape the work’s rhythm and form. Together, these pieces articulate a practice grounded in research-by-immersion, where sculpture, performance, and process continually fold into one another.
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Submerge is therefore positioned here not as background, but as a structural key. It reveals the methodological grammar with which Franke approaches her current project and frames the viewer’s entry into the five-month unfolding of Mudar: a practice that listens, moves, absorbs, and transforms in dialogue with the environments it inhabits.
