An-other Trash Culture | eine andere Trash-Kultur
Krems, Austria \ Krems, Österreich
2025
Tags: installation, sustainibility,
Ecumenical Corporeality: Corpus Christi. Amen. You are what you eat, you live how you build. Christians, Catholics and cannibals east 'human' meat . . . one feeds on human flesh or organs to ingest or eliminate the traits and virtues of the dead: power, authority, visibility . . . assimilate, accept, interpret, incorporate, digest, reuse, repurpose, redesign, revitalize, replace, dispense . . . architectural actions like a theophagy: the cathedral becomes a temple . . . result is an (in the broadest sense) an anthropomorphic architecture. every use of material is a reuse or repurposing, because the action takes place using something that already exists.
- Excerpt from Cannibal Architecture, Alberto Alessi
A satirical ensemble of dishes which frames urgent discourses on the excesses of construction waste particular to the Global North, and its asymmetric response to climate change. Known for its terraced vineyards and exceptional wines, this mise-en-place is realized through walks all across the World Heritage landscape of the Wachau – from Krems to Durnstein to Melk – discovering the entanglement of building cultures within nature at large, and a primal drive of slow foraging on the fringes of settlements.
Scattered across the mess of the dining table, are tiny human figurines. Mediated with a framing device, people experience the space from another point-of-view, where it becomes a gesamtkunstwerk or a whole world - and objects which seem carelessly thrown around from the outset, now take on the proportions of an environmental backdrop - both landscape and built.
In attempting to seek out these tiny people in the world, people hunch over the table. The installation is designed to invoke within a late-stage capital era human the physicality of the nonhuman - a liminal posture somewhere between the biped and the quadruped - inhabiting relations which go beyond a typically urban bubble, generally oblivious of its precarious role in climate change, food security and pollution.
