We Swim in One Water / act IV, ocean blue

This installation is a curiosity cabinet of the future, an extensive collection of hybrid sculptures, assembled from diverse artefacts of the environment: household objects, parts of machines, medical items, tools, consumer goods, elements of nature, minerals, plants and animals. Seemingly familiar objects intergrow through each other and transmute into new species. These hybrids are a fainting remembrance of the existing and extinct species, or some imagined Newcoming species, the retooled-paramecium-caudatum and the cyborg-dinosaurs, that anthropologists of the future might encounter. The installation addresses the intimate connections between organisms, fragility of ecosystems, and uncertainty of the future. It is moved by the beauty of the world on one hand and a constant anxiety for what might come with climate change and mass extinction on the other. The familiar categories and boundaries become reshuffled in the rapidly changing world – the romantic notions of nature die out as naïve, but something new, exciting, if not dangerous, is also coming in its stead. This work is a slice of undefined time and space; a site of both genesis and apocalypse, playful gathering and lethargic dream, beauty and catastrophe. Floating driftwood of the future is overgrown with plastic fungi. Turtle shells are filled with styrofoam. Stones and fossils are covered in pinkish chewing gum. Culture, nature, past, present and future – everything comes together here. We swim in one water: we live together in a perpetual intra-action, and our bodies penetrate each other, sometimes even without noticing it.