STUDIO KIM/ILLI
D-10997 BERLIN    ︎    13°19'59.5"E    GER    서울    KOR    巴科洛德    6100 PH

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SOIL-BEINGS (Lamánlupa)
→ 2024—2025



















“Soil-beings (Lamánlupa) honors soil as the central element of architectural understanding,” the NCCA says it “invites the public to sense soil not merely as a component of construction but as a kin and life force integral to existence.”
19th Venice Biennale of Architecture (Mostra internazionale di architettura di Venezia)
Philippine Pavilion 2025

Venice, IT
National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA)
Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA)
Office of Senator Loren Legarda
Cur. Renan Laru-an
Art. Christian Tenefrancia Illi




























The Terrarium does not present soil as an inert backdrop to human life but as a dynamic force, a space of motion and interaction, absorbing and releasing histories, ecologies, and affects.

Soil is never still. It shifts, breathes, erodes, replenishes, and transforms. What appears as solid ground beneath our feet is a vortex—an endless spiral of movement, decay, and renewal. 

In this way, soil is not a fixed object but a process, always in motion, shifting with weather, climate, extraction, agriculture, and war. It is moved by wind, shaped by water, compacted under colonial infrastructures, and displaced by urban expansion. It is inhaled as dust in factories and expelled as toxic sediments into rivers.


































Soil is—rain, rich, minerals, fertile, ash, regenerative, roots, thriving, ecosystems, lush landscapes, natural, rock, formations, boron, clay, healing, transformation, minerals, growth, organic, renewable, energy, vibrant, compost, clean, water, flourishing, wet, biodiverse, landscapes, sun-kissed, natural, cyclic, flourishing, forests, sustainable, agriculture, mindful, irrigation, erosion, force, control, iron, cooperative, labor, restored, land, lithium, balance, carbon, capture, methane, crops, thriving, food, resilient, transitions, cultivation, solutions, self-sustaining, pipelines, permaculture, restoration, air, thriving, wildlife, wetlands, regenerative, nutrient, life-giving, living landscape, biodiversity, sustainable, energy, restoration—renewal.


















Arup Germany
Natural Building Lab (TU Berlin)
Bureau of Soils and Water Management (BSWM)
University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB)
Division of Soil Science — Agricultural Systems Institute
Visayas State University (VSU)
[...]

RIS-D: BEING IN BETWEEN
→ 2022









TINIKLING.EXE / TERROR or ¾

A machine stutters. Metal arms snap together, gnashing like mechanical jaws. Bamboo poles collide, a violent clap echoing through the space. The rhythm is both erratic and relentless—too forceful to be graceful, too (un)precise to be human/machine. A foot hovers over a pedal, hesitant. To step is to activate the machine. To activate the machine is to invoke the past.

The installation resurrects the choreography of Tinikling, a folk dance that is at once a celebration and a reenactment of colonial punishment. In the Spanish-occupied Philippines, those who failed to meet their labor quotas were forced between bamboo poles that clapped against their ankles—an improvised device of discipline, later transformed into ritual. The dance is an algorithm of survival: a body forced to adapt to rhythms not of its own making, leaping between violent constraints, improvising within the logic of colonial rule.

Galería H2O
Barcelona, ES
Art Nou 2022




Solo exhibition in the 2022 iteration of the Art Nou festival in Barcelona and L’Hospitalet de Llobregat


































Here, the human dancer is absent. Instead, robotic limbs—scavenged from the wreckages of the extractive automobile industry—inherit the task of mechanical violence. The bamboo, once a tool of both punishment and play, now performs autonomously, detached from its historical operators. The machine does not dance. It does not remember. It only executes.

But somewhere between execution and repetition, a question arises; who or what is the subject of this performance? The colonial apparatus has long automated itself—economic policies, surveillance technologies, global labor flows—each iteration more abstracted than the last. The tinikling bird, evading its captors, has become data. The foot hovers over the pedal. A decision lingers. In the gaps between movement and machinery, between history and code, resistance is rewritten.
CHOREOGRAPHIES OF LABO(U)R
→ 2020

















































Finding patterns and structures in capturing the ‘Choreographies of Labo(u)r’ in the very specificity of precise actions and body movements of (undocumented) oversea workers.
KSTN Projektraum
Berlin, DE
Ambactia Memoria
SomoS Arts
















































Thus creating juxtapositions of diverse acts of mechanical and soft gesticulations that can be translated into a performative act that exposes methodologies of violence and exploitation into the actuality and climate of daily life.
REVERSED DUNK
→ 2021—2023








































‘Reversed Dunk’ explores the intricate complexities of urban dynamics, historical perceptions and monumental manifestations of capitalism as well as perspectives on cultural appropriation.
Allianz / Amazon Tower
Warschauer Brücke

Berlin, DE
EDGE Technologies
Bjarke Ingels Group

 



Reversed Dunk is a public space intervention in the form of a large scale, site specific installation. An impossible basketball court has been installed at Warschauer Brücke. The realization is a commentary on the structural limitations for genuine urban culture within the neoliberal logic of spatial aggregation and separation. Designed in accordance with the physical and symbolic character of the surrounding area, Reversed Dunk reflects on the historical transformation of the former borderline zone—between traditionally working class neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain—into a district of commerce, tourism and mass entertainment. Decapitated exponential growth: Echoing a fragment of a piece of the Berlin Wall KIM/ILLI’s installation points to the history of gentrification and arrival of global capital to Berlin since 1989. The processes which result in new separations and divisions within the city and expropriation of quotidian urban street cultures. Beyond critical and discursive commentary Reversed Dunk is an attempt to restore public space and create a public vessel for testimonies of gentrification—a site for public expression and articulation of social sentiment.
REVERSED DUNK
→ 2021—2023
Allianz / Amazon Tower
Warschauer Brücke

Berlin, DE
EDGE Technologies
Bjarke Ingels Group
AR Ingenieure
Fa. Rohlfing
Züblin
REVERSED DUNK
→ 2021—2023  
Allianz / Amazon Tower
Warschauer Brücke

Berlin, DE
EDGE Technologies
Bjarke Ingels Group
AR Ingenieure
Fa. Rohlfing
Züblin