Rocho’s artistic practice engages with themes of nostalgia, intimacy, vulnerability, loneliness, and obsession. Her approach is based on connecting textile and tactile structures, materials, and fragments with narrative moments, thereby weaving boundaries between reality and fantasy. In this way, textile tableaux are created through motifs and symbols that evoke mythological, fairy-tale, or occult visual worlds.
A recurring strategy in her work is the interplay of contrasting material qualities such as soft and hard, opaque and translucent, fragile and cool. Rocho’s installations generate tensions between intimacy and distance, nostalgia and obsession, attraction and repulsion. Through this interplay, her practice invites viewers not only to look, but to engage physically and sensorially with the work, while consistently aiming to open new perspectives on textiles and spatial experience.

Within these worlds, fantasy and reality merge—collective knowledge and symbolic
codes are interwoven with deeply personal experiences and past narratives to form
new narrative moments. Rochos practice thus becomes a space in which materials, emotions, and symbols enter into relation with one another.
Her works aim for moments of lingering, where fantasy and reality intersect.
Rather than presenting a finished outcome, the works unfold as states of becoming
and reflection. Through this approach, she reveals the almost supernatural power of fibers and fabrics, allowing materials and space to speak for themselves.

Rocho’s engagement with material is informed by Jane Bennett’s concept of vital materiality, which assumes that materials possess their own agency. Since 2021, Rocho has explicitly referenced Bennett’s theories as articulated in Vibrant Matter, which attribute a nearly “mysterious” agency to materials. A related philosophical reference resonates quietly through her practice in a thought by Gilles Deleuze: “Folds ‘are realized’ in matter and ‘actualized’ in the soul.” This understanding shapes Rochos perception of textiles and subtly informs their spatial installation. Her works recall textile tableaux while simultaneously opening up a renewed understanding of the form.

Lara Rocho is a German-Tunisian artist living and working in Berlin.
Her recent work Longing for a Hero serves as a point of departure for ongoing investigations into heroes, archetypes, and their myths.