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Wasteland

Topographic Paper Sculpture
2020
01 | Disposable Plate
02 | Foldable Selfie Stick
03 | Real Touch Fake Plant
04 | Soft Plastic Baits

Wasteland

Topographic Paper Sculpture

2020

White mounting board, 300gsm. Hand cut, loosely stacked and framed. Series of 12, 60X45x2cm each.

The project depicts the landscapes of twelve extraction sites whose contours mirror cheap consumer products found on Amazon.com. It aims at encouraging consumers to rethink their shopping behavior and stop buying stuff they don’t need.

Our obsession with economic growth has locked us into a spiral of escalating materialism and consumerism globally. The need to create ever more stuff has led to a dramatic increase in the production of waste. As we continue to turn the entire planet into a giant dump, it seems that the term garbage no longer relates solely to unwanted by-products or to primary products once discarded. It also accurately describes a great many products we actually produce for consumption. Today, an endless stream of basically useless and unnecessary items, cheap and disposable for easy replacement, is flooding the market.

With the same frivolity modern consumer society produces and disposes of the things it no longer wants, it subdues and exploits the natural environment and pillages the earth of valuable resources. Both the use of subtractive and additive processes have turned vast landscapes into post-apocalyptic wastelands. We try our best to erase these environmental hellholes from our maps and minds, where they leave blank spots that continue to grow every year.

Landscapes of extraction

In light of this, «Wasteland» portrays a selection of essentially useless consumer goods as abstract contour models. Their negative shapes are reminiscent of the cavities caused by open pit mining, where earth gets removed in successive layers to harvest its treasures. Each object etches a blank space into the paper that serves to illustrate the visible scars that our consumer culture leaves on the landscape. It also symbolizes the precipice to the edge of which the growing hunger for raw materials is leading us. At the same time, however, the series evokes the idea of a world without objects. The elegance and delicacy of paper is suggestive of landscapes both untouched and unaltered by man. It is in their absence that the cheap products suddenly appear imbued with beauty.

Be it «Soft Plastic Baits», «Disposable Plates», «Dog Booties», «Balloon Dog Figurines», «Solar Pest Repellers», «Zombie Action Figures», «Magical Cleaning Gloves», «Selfie Drones», «Foldable Selfie Sticks», «Real Touch Fake Plants», «Hamster Leashes», or «Radio Control Snakes». Man-made commodities flood our world without cease, and trash has become our landscape, both literally and figuratively. It would come as no surprise if some day our society would be sadly remembered as the one that left nothing but garbage behind.

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