The Plague I–III (1000+1 Project)
The Plague I
As an artist, I have been dealing with animal metaphors and their anthropomorphic design in the visual realm for a long time (incarnation of the monkey according to Kafka’s “Report to an Academy”, 2015; sharks according to Brecht’s “If the Sharks were People”, 2016). In 2017 I turned to the concept of swarm intelligence in animals and insects, plaguing myself to complete a graphic series of 11 sheets, dedicating one hand-drawn industrious ant to each of the approximately 28.000 artists in Berlin and Brandenburg for whom it is difficult to find enough recognition to be able to live from their art. In 2019, while reading the newspaper about the behavior of financial investors and hedge funds on the housing market in Berlin, I came across the so-called locust debate (“Heuschreckendebatte”) from 2005 and the dispute between Mr. Müntefering (SPD) and Professor Wolffsohn, as well as an ad from Thyssenkrupp that said “[...] to prevent a swarm of locusts [financial investors like hedge fonds] from descending on a company and picking it clean”.
Fascinated by the equally productive and destructive potential of the grasshoppers in the economy, I used my photos of desert locusts from my years in Namibia (2008–2010) to graphically and aesthetically deal with the beauty of the horror of these insects, which endanger Africa’s and Asia’s food supply. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, a small swarm of about a square kilometer can potentially destroy the basic food resource of 35,000 people within days. Exactly that happened in February 2020, when huge swarms of desert locusts invaded the states of East Africa attacking and preying on then livelihood of millions of small farmers. All of that coincided chronologically with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the apocalyptic pictures from the hospital in Bergamo were suddenly merging with pictures of the devastated fields in Kenya.
The forces of the COVID-19 pandemic and the worldwide lockdowns have given me the Camusian feeling of being at the mercy of others and the threat of an insidious plague on my doorstep. In preparation for this exhibition I thought that the title “Plague” might be suitable for connecting the visitor, the viewer, the curator and the gallerist with me as well as with my works of art. Something that could be perceived with all the senses and simultaneously give rise to a lasting reflection on what a plague is all about. Still under the impression of the exponential growth of the swarm of desert locusts, which has spread from East Africa to Pakistan and India, and then influenced by the exponential growth of coronavirus cases before the lockdowns, I decided to complete the graphic series project 1000+1. The idea was born, the list of materials for the project gave an outlook on the extent of plaguing oneself:
The production of the objects also required the photography of my graphics for the production of the print template as well as the subsequent cutting and unfolding and stitching and assembling of the top and bottom sides of the boxes and their filling with the chocolates. All in all, it took six days of monotonous work, a plague for myself. I intended to create bitter-sweet feelings. I hoped that the visitor would enjoy the sweet sensation of my piece of handcrafted chocolate while in a kind of cognitive conflict by being visually stimulated to reflect plagues endangering the foundations of our lives. Ideally, visitors would be equally stimulated to think of things the human race can do to remedy, or better yet, prevent such situations in the future.
I sincerely thank the gallery owner of the gallery Heike Arndt DK and her team for creating a space to experience my artwork and reflect on the impacts of various forms of plagues on humans and nature in general. My object “+1” is also a thank you and pays tribute to Lee Mingwei and his participatory understanding of the art of giving and taking that was on display in his exhibition “Gifts and Rituals” (2020) at the Gropius Bau, Berlin at which I could be part of with my object in the “Fabrics of Memory” department.
The Plague II
In consequence of having seen my graphic series ”The Plague“ at the Heike Arndt Dk Gallery Berlin, another Berlin based gallerist, Tom Albrecht, from the GG3 Group Global 3000 Gallery invited me to take part in an exhibition under the title “Corona and Climate Crisis”. This gallery has committed itself to a comprehensive sustainability concept for all aspects and sectors of art.
Being invited to a gallery to produce an artwork under given strict sustainability criteria instead of offering my already existing objects of art, it occurred to me that it would be apt to create new art by upcycling the remainders of my last exhibition (“The Plague I”) into works of art under the new title “The Plague II”. The remainders of ”The Plague I” were 600 leftover flyers from ”The Plague I” exhibition printed with the motive of my hand-drawn desert locust and informative text in form of double sided printed postcards in the format of 10 x 20 cm.
I kicked off the “Plague II Project” by cutting out around 400 desert locust motives from the recent flyers and upcycled them into three new three-dimensional objects of art under the title “The Plague II – 1”, “Plague II – 2”, “Plague II – 3” by using the artistic technique of a collage of the cut out desert locust motives by sticking and clamping them together on a basis of white cardboard and the leftover postcards from which I had cut out the desert locust motives before. Hence, the single prints of the hand-drawn desert locusts could be arranged intentionally to form a series of three vivid three- dimensional objects of art in the format of 70 x100 cm each, depicting 3 different stages in the movement of a desert locust swarm, thus mirroring the simultaneous double effect of deadly horror and utmost fascination, which is one of the impacts of the real desert locust plague. This plague, which extended from Kenia via Jemen and the Arab Peninsula towards Pakistan, hit the poorest the hardest in 2020, coinciding with the worldwide plague of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The plague III, installation and video
(1000+1 / 1000+ n; I plague myself / bowed by the drudgery I rise above it)
The years 2020 and 2021 were – and still are – dominated by two simultaneous crises caused by natural plagues, which are globally experienced as life-threatening: The COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple desert locust plagues spreading in Africa and Asia. Mankind perceives these plagues with the Camusian feeling of being at the mercy of others while being exposed and existantially threatened at the global level – all while scientists had recently proclaimed the age of the Anthropocene, an epoche in the history of mankind in which our species has become the the single most decisive factor that is determining the fate, the future, and the general sustainability of our blue planet.
Both kind of plagues contain the danger of exponential growth of their threatening risk potential. This is responsible for the same allure of fright that we experience while watching horror films. The existence- destroying consequences of both plagues are accessible to visual perception, but only the manner in which the swarms of desert locusts act are visible to the naked eye. Therefore, it serves at the metalevel of my installation as a symbol for the experience in dealing with plagues affecting the human collective in general.
A small swarm of desert locusts covering a square kilometer can, according to the FAO, eradicate an amount of maize, which corresponds to the consumption of this staple food by 35.000 human beings on a daily basis. A desert locust eats away the equivalent of its own body weight per day. On each and every single one of the 1300 cardboard boxes at my installation are 5 copies of hand-drawn desert locusts visible, which originate from the 11 sheets of my graphic series “The Plague I“. For each of these 5 desert locusts on the small boxes there are 20 hand counted corns of maize, which equals an amount of 100 maize corns per cube. My own way to experience the bitter impact of a plague therefore was to count 130.000 pieces of sweet corn manually.
VOLVER