Damage and restoration (2024)

Site-specific instalation / concrete, asphalt, polyester, motors, plaster boards / 3400x1800x430mmx

A collapsed wall, placed where a real functional wall once stood, is a work of art standing on the borderline between collapse and reconstruction. Inside the wall is a space depicting the site of fossil excavation. Artwork Damage and restoration change the primary functionalities of the technological and the industrial by combining the natural and the artistic contexts. The animal skeletons are ready-made works of art on display in natural history museums or similar institutions. The remains of the bodies were not made with the intention of being works of art, yet they are assigned such a function in museums. Equally unexpressed is the aesthetic and artistic function of technological and industrial elements in their everyday context of use, as their purpose is to be practical and effective. If we add to the unexpressed aesthetic and artistic function the meaning of food or processing, we get reduced to the engines, which we will present in the artwork as fossils. The meaning of food works on two levels - in their everyday use, the engines feed on refined fossilised vegetation, or petroleum.* On another level, we trace the beginnings of fossil formation: when an animal dies, the soft parts of its body are processed, feeding other animals and the soil, and plants. What is left are usually bones, which then rest in a layer of sedimentary rock and may one day become works of art in museums. In the context of machine use, engines are therefore similar to skeletons in that their complex structure is more difficult to reconstruct when they are damaged, while other parts can be more easily replaced, repaired or repurposed for other uses. It is common to say that a car is totalled when the engine is damaged, so engines are damaged by cutting, because only when sufficiently damaged can they become museum objects, parallel to fossils.

* Here we could suggest that the remains of machines are food for some other entities in a (non-existent) parallel world.