La Caoba (Larry Bonćhaka & Sopo Kashakashvili)

Artists Larry Bonćhaka (b. 1994, Accra, Ghana) and Sopo Kashakashvili (b. 1994, Tbilisi, Georgia) collaborate as an artistic duo, blending culinary practices, socio-political research, cross-cultural exchange, and community-led projects.

Working across installation, performance, culinary arts, ecological activism, and sound, their practice primarily engages public spaces, often site-specifically, to create immersive and participatory experiences. Through their interventions, spaces transform into platforms for gathering, exchange, and collective dreaming.

Their ongoing project and movement, LA CAOBA, creates spaces where humans and nature can coexist in times of ecological crisis, shifting land policies, and transnational climate urgency.

Bonćhaka and Kashakashvili are founding members of the artist and architect collective commune6x3. Their work has been presented at Nassauischer Kunstverein Wiesbaden e.V.; Opelvillen Rüsselsheim; Theater der Welt (Frankfurt am Main); Kreßmann Halle Offenbach am Main; Diamant Museum of Urban Culture; documenta 15 (with commune6x3); Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm; Royal Parade Grounds (Kumasi, Ghana); Sakhile&Me Gallery; and Frankfurter Kunstverein.

La Caoba

La Caoba began as a move towards economic emancipation and an act of sharing our homelands, which is Georgia and Ghana. To support our artistic practices we sold spices and tea blends from our homeland and organised performance dinners. The deeper our interest got, we realized we had overlooked important concerns in relation to ecological crisis, land grabs from indigenous communities, deforestation, unfair wages for farmers, just to name a few.

With this awareness, we became dedicated to finding out how we can educate ourselves and our communities on ecology related issues, labor, decolonial practices, food sovereignty through tea and spice blend workshops, interactive installations, seed sharing and collective acts of care.

Recently, the project has worked with people and organizations involved in urban development, focusing on Frankfurt am Main and Accra. We look closely at how cities are shaped, especially because profit-driven planning often leads to damage and displacement.

To respond to these concerns, we are initiating the installation of functioning greenhouses along abandoned railway lines in Frankfurt am Main. As a parallel response to the same concerns, particularly the widespread sale of land to real estate developers who construct modern housing that remains financially inaccessible to local communities, we are undertaking the reforestation of a depleted one-acre plot in Prampram, Accra.

From rest to unrest, from rooms to hotels, from hotels to apartments, from farms to gardens to homes—we keep moving. La Caoba is always in motion, practicing life as art and art as life, with respect and with empathy.