dødvande/deadlock

The works consists of wheat stems on electromagnetic pendulums, straws mechanically tilt back and forth, forming a flickering image of movements out of sync with each other mimicing a field. The field is both technology and nature, it points to the entanglement of human practices with the natural world. But there is no life in this field, the grain does not grow. In Denmark, the yellow fields of grain have been a national romantic symbol since the 19th century.

The image of the field with it’s undulating straws is exemplary to the danish landscape, it is highly industrialized agriculture. An optimized monoculture that promotes one crop and eliminates everything else in the process. It embodies the banality of the anthropocene as a piece of man-made nature that initiates irreversible processes with consequences that are not immediately visible. Everything has changed, but in some ways still seems the same. The grain straws tilt mechanically back and forth in a collective deadlock.