български

Earth

Author

Sascha Pohle

Birth year

1972

Place of birth

Germany
Duesseldorf

Year of creation

2021

Dimensions

242 x 297 x 3 cm

Information on media/technique

coffee table book, series of cast bronze objects

Section

Installation

More information

saschapohle.net

Biennale

25th Gabrovo Biennial of Humor and Satire in Art

Short description

EARTH is a coffee table book and series of casted bronze objects. coffee table book, 29,7 x 24,2 cm, b&w, 380 pages, brass objects, dimension variable Earth began with a reflection on our excessive use of disposable coffee cups, the creation of trash, associated with the exploitation of nature and human, and the question what all of this might have to do with belief or how coffee could stand as the epitome of our urge mental and physical productive power. Throughout the book, each double page shows a photo of spilled coffee stains and an rephotographed image of Andre Malraux’s, The Imaginary Museum of World Sculpture III: The Christian World. Additionally various pages are decorated with fragments of maps from different areas and epochs - regional maps, worldmaps, colonial maps - used as graphic and contextual elements. Each coffee stain is named after similar-looking satellite Earth observatory images found on NASA or ESA's website that document natural disasters, traces of global warming or locations of resource exploitation. Just as fortune tellers in Turkey read future in the coffee grounds on the bottom of the cup and saucer, this type of naming of coffee stains could be seen as a kind of reverse fortune telling. EARTH adapts the form of a typical, large and heavy coffee table book, in which the weight corresponds to the severity of the topic, but which is also balanced by the nature of such a book, which is more inviting for visual entertainment. Throughout the book there are fictional and someties absurd coffee conversations with caesuras about coffee, Covid-19, coffee brewing systems and some references to films and literature. The other part of EARTH is a series of solid brass objects. The bottom is cast from the round lids of Americanos To-Go and the top is made from hot wax that was poured into cold coffee or water. The shape of the objects is inspired by Korean suseoks (philosopher's stones) and the Globus Cruciger (half a cross-crowned globe held by the ancient Christian emperors).

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