Fragile Homes. Migrating Landscapes

Hybrid media installation, 2026

A collaborative project by Yulia Mashkova and Grisha Mumrikov

Winner of the DM-Award 2026, UNESCO City of Media Arts Karlsruhe

SCHLOSSLICHTSPIELE Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe Palace & Schlossgarten

Fragile Homes. Migrating Landscapes is a collaborative project by Grisha Mumrikov and Yulia Mashkova (Yu-Ma), developed from their shared experience of forced migration and displacement.

The project explores migration through the relationship between the human body, the city, and the natural landscape. It began with a material that had become inseparable from everyday migrant life: paper. Applications, permits, visas, translations, receipts, and other bureaucratic documents gradually ceased to function only as carriers of information and became an emotionally charged archive of movement, control, waiting, and adaptation.

In Fragile Homes, this paper is physically transformed. Documents are torn apart, soaked, and reshaped into fragile sculptural bodies. Personal information disappears, while the material itself remains. What once recorded and regulated a person’s movement becomes the material of a new, temporary shelter.

The project unfolds between digital and physical space. In the video work projected onto the façade of Karlsruhe Palace, hollow human figures covered with fragments of documents and maps move through a sequence of accumulated cities. Migration routes become veins; maps turn into organic networks. Eventually, the radial structure of Karlsruhe transforms into roots and a neural system, dissolving the boundaries between body, city, and forest.

The physical installation in the Schlossgarten consists of three interactive sculptural Listening Stations, made from recycled paper and bureaucratic documents. As visitors approach, the sculptures respond with light and sound, turning each hollow body into a resonant space. Together, the three sculptures create a spatial sound composition and form a physical counterpart to the transformation taking place on the palace façade.

The material itself was produced through a collective process. During public workshops in Karlsruhe, participants brought documents they no longer needed and destroyed them by hand—tearing, soaking, kneading, and transforming them into new material for the sculptures. The administrative meaning of the documents disappeared, while traces of individual lives became part of a collective body.

Fragile Homes. Migrating Landscapes asks whether home and belonging must be rooted in a fixed place. Can they also grow through the new connections we create together?

The video begins with bureaucratic exhaustion. Clouds of fine particles move across the facade, gradually revealing fragments of official vocabulary, administrative formulas and impersonal words within a dense field of information.
Within this textual climate, human silhouettes emerge. Bureaucratic language does not merely surround them — it fills them. Their bodies become temporary concentrations within a system of words through which their lives are classified and administered.
Gradually, administrative language gives way to personal names and the names of trees. The figures become hollow branching structures — part neural network, part mycelium, part root system — and grow into a living forest, an extraterritorial home based on interdependence rather than proof. The sound follows the same transformation, moving from electrical noise and buzzing toward the human breath of a clarinet.
Concept, artistic direction & project development: Yulia Mashkova, Grisha Mumrikov.
Original music / Sound design: Grisha Mumrikov, Andrey Guryanov.
Generative / AI production: Peter Ivanov, Mikhail Ivanov, Pavel Gordeev. 3D: Anna Sokolova. Video production: Egor Alentev, Ilya Smilga