Mirrored Dimensions (toolittletoolate / giantleap) l 2023
50 years after The Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome, Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Our Planet is published, which deals with the question of how a good life for all can be achieved within planetary boundaries before the end of this century. Inspired by the two future scenarios toolittletoolate and giantleap described in it, the video installation Mirrored Dimensions shows a mirrored world whose two sides show parallels but still diametrically different from each other. Through overpainting filmed material, changes are inserted which could happen both locally and globally during this century, depending on the scenario. The work asks subtle questions about what kind of future might await us if essential turnarounds are efficiently made or missed before the end of this century.
Torn pieces of paper and mirror shards finally break up the dualism of the video and fragment it into the space: Individual pieces of a puzzle emerge suggesting that it‘s up to ourselves to build our future. For this does not have to be as described in the toolittletoolate or giantleap scenario - rather, it can take on parts of both, be somewhere in between or open up entirely new voids for the unknown which cannot yet be imagined in the present.
Photographs © Stefan Wahler
body_factory l 2022
The title body_factory carries a high degree of ambivalence due to the juxtaposition of two terms that at first seem contrary and incompatible. Whereas body is associated with something organic, warm and alive, factory stands for something technical, cold and constructed aout of dead material. Body factories are indeed places of numerous ambivalences. They and everything which happens inside of them are usually deliberately kept hidden from the public awareness. At the same time, the daily consumption of our affluent society is closely linked to these same invisible places. While meat is often associated with indulgence, prosperity and feasting, slaughterhouses evoke rather unpleasant associations.
body_factory refers to the gap between consumption and production of one and the same product and intends to eliminate it: It is about making the invisible visible - invisible connections and contexts, invisible protagonists, bodies and stories, human and animal. The aim is to enable a deeper examination of industrial slaughterhouses, where hundreds of workers process thousands of animal carcasses per day under the most severe physical and psychological strain, in order to guarantee our enormous meat consumption, which small family farms can no longer support.
The installation consists of three groups of works, each with a different focus. The numerous connections that can be drawn between them provide an insight into the complex relationships between everyday meals, animal body masses and the daily working lives of factory workers.
Photographs © Stefan Wahler
STOFF_WECHSEL l 2021
Helena Detsch I Emilia Forck I Melanie Schmidt I Karoline Lechner I Susana Trcka-Rojas
STOFF_WECHSEL is an interactive installation space that was realized in a interdisciplinary cooperation with students from different Austrian art universities as part of the Arts of Change project in Auer-Welsbach-Park Vienna in September 2021. STOFF_WECHSEL highlights capitalist dynamics that are deeply rooted in our society and questions them. The focus is on two areas which are closely linked through their instrumentalization for more growth and efficiency: The inseparable pair of consumption and production (keywords mass production, exploitation, waste, disposable society) and the associated social values (keywords self-optimization, work-life balance, stress factors, burnout). In addition, an interactive utopia space opens up at the center of the installation, in which visitors can try out transformative approaches to their own way of life towards degrowth and post-growth through playful inputs in various media.
