Katja Aglert
Vehicle for Decay and Construction
Vehicle for Decay and Construction
Title: Vehicle for Decay and Construction
Date: 2021
Medium: Photoshop renderings on paper
Artist: Katja Aglert
Exhibition: Blue Sky Gardening, 2021
From press release:
The starting point for this proposed project entitled Vehicle for Decay and Construction, is the idea to purchase a fully functioning car, and instantly take it out of service by parking it for an eternal future, on Doughty Street, next to Mecklenburg Square Garden. The car keys will be thrown away, and gas, oil and so on, emptied, sorted and re-cycled according to sustainable standards and the car will be attached to the ground. It will be re-contextualized with the idea that, instead of exploiting the earth’s resources, the car can become means for new life and ecosystems to take place.
With connection to water/rain/climate the car will be in an environmental framework beneficial for growing a green milieu, consisting of plants such as moss, ivy, and fern. Through this mixed media living sculpture, the qualities of the flora will function as a water absorber during cloud bursts or rain in general. The placement of the car is the starting point for a celebration of decay, and the construction of a new living system that inevitably slowly will take over.
The act of buying a car and deliberately shutting it off by taking it out of the system for which it was made, can be seen as a civil act of climate resilience. Despite all hard facts, we seem not yet to be ready to interfere with our habits of life style, and to commit to some of the ‘sacrifices’ related to climate challenges. Embedded in this project’s discourse is a criticality of some of the priorities we have in our society.
The car as structure for a natural system is inspired by the re-cycled ships that have been deliberately sunk in the ocean as a means to create new habitats for coral reefs to evolve. “Living as form” (borrowing the term from Nato Thompson) is part of this project’s inner nature and as such it embodies constant transformation, rather than a static artistic representation of certain inquiries or discourses.
Vehicle for Decay and Construction was initially developed in 2014 for The Copenhagen Climate Competition, and is here reiterated specifically for the Blue Sky Gardening exhibition in Mecklenburg Square Garden.
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