Caterina Carraro

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

Artist statement

My practice explores how life might evolve beyond human-centred and binary systems. I work across sculpture, painting, 3D modelling, moving image, and installation to develop Terrapolis, an ongoing speculative ecosystem inhabited by hybrid species whose bodies blur distinctions between plant, animal, mineral, and human forms. Through speculative fiction and queer ecology, I investigate alternative forms of embodiment, reproduction, intelligence, and coexistence. Rather than illustrating a predetermined future, I use Terrapolis as a research space where unfamiliar biological possibilities can emerge. My sculptures function as specimens, while paintings operate as field observations of the habitats in which these organisms might live. Digital modelling allows me to study possible morphologies before translating them into physical matter. Alongside these works, I am developing an evolving bestiary: a speculative taxonomy in which classification becomes a tool for invention rather than a system for fixing life into stable categories. Across the project, organism and environment are inseparable. Bodies emerge from their substrates, mineral and organic matter intersect, and habitats actively shape the species they sustain. Terrapolis remains deliberately unfinished: a living archive of organisms, landscapes, and hypotheses that continues to change as new species are imagined.

Artwork