an effegy of human occupation
from mud and seeds and litter
cut to shape
organic decreation
For millennia, humans have created depictions of entities beyond their control and subjected them to ritualized destruction.
Just as long, sites of human dwelling have been abandoned, becoming substrate, occupied by nature beyond recognition.
Living in a city where wastelands formed creative playgrounds until they were swallowed up by global real estate business, I have often dreamt of a vista where those architectures become rubble again, overgrown by trees, completing the cycle towards the urban jungle that I came to Berlin for.
For this piece, I photogrammetrically created 3D-Models of different sites of human intervention in the city – the fake “stadtschloss” in the city center, the A100 highway extension in Neukölln, a particularly eccentric pile of garbage dumped on the road I live in.
While taking the photos, I also collected soil and seeds from the sites, which I mixed into clay to create a substrate for the respective sculptures.
After drying, I selected a part of the 3D-Model and milled it into the clay blocks using a CNC mill with a coarse bit and large step-down values, resulting in a semi-abstract representation of the originals. The process violently shreds the material into tiny pieces of dust and is in many ways the opposite of the tender, no waste logic of manual plastic deformation traditionally used to work with clay.
The clay in the seeds inside it have their own agency, with tensions form the drying process creating cracks in the material, and the seeds waiting for their opportunity to take over the material when they come in contact with water.
Felix Bonowski 