It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look

  • Chloé Roubert
  • Gemma Savio
Chloé Roubert and Gemma Savio, It Takes Work to Get the Natural Look, 2015. Lawn, 45m x 45m. Photo: Chloé Roubert. Courtesy the artists.

It Takes Work to Get The Natural Look was an intervention on the lawn of the Walter Gropius-designed, UNESCO-listed Bauhaus Building in Dessau, Germany. Taking the Bauhaus lawn as the subject of their site-specific work, anthropologist Chloé Roubert and architect Gemma Savio explore the mechanisms behind the commodification of organic matter, the labour processes concealed within the modern project, and the performative condition of gender. The work was visible until the lawn’s flora outgrew and returned it to the uniformity of the surrounding landscape. A new iteration will be presented at the University of Toronto Mississauga in July 2017 as part of How Far Afield?, an exhibition of campus interventions curated by Alison Cooley and Jayne Wilkinson of the Blackwood Gallery.



Chloé Roubert is an artist and anthropologist whose practice is research-driven and blends writing and design. She is interested in human-organic life relations, urban space, and taxonomies. Her work has been shown at the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada, Bétonsalon in Paris, and the Bauhaus-Dessau Foundation in Germany.

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Gemma Savio is an architect and academic. Her research is focused on the processes of architectural production under the accelerated conditions of political economy across the twentieth century. Savio is a PhD candidate at the University of Newcastle (Australia).

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