Go to Hessler’s offices at the Swiss Institute in New York and you might think she’s let the place go since becoming director last year. In fact, the mismatched paint on the walls are part of the changes she’s made to improve the New York nonprofit’s sustainability (building on experience with the research-based exhibition Sex Ecologies, 2021, at former workplace Kunsthall Trondheim, and from her time preceding that curating at the ocean-focused TBA21–Academy). While these include carbon audits and the like, the curatorial initiative ‘Spora’ aims at ‘environmental, institutional critique’, inviting artists to make suggestions – such as Helen Mirra’s, that only leftover paint be used when touching up nongallery spaces. Hessler inaugurated her programme with shows for, among others, Lap-See Lam and her portrait of the Hong Kong Chinese diaspora, and Ali Cherri’s sculptures with their invocations of mud and its symbolic qualities. When visiting, just mind the staff member taking their lunch scraps to the roof: they are depositing them in a composting sculpture by Jenna Sutela.