Is It Love Or Cathexis is following the question »Who needs an icebreaker when you can count on melting ice?«1. The work consists of various storytelling documenting a cathectic relation towards the melting ice. The installation is working as a space where the process of cathexis with the possible outcome of love towards the ice also becomes a place for mourning and remembering it. The sheets refer to the covering of the Rhône Glaciers as a desperate practice of care for the environment as well as an embodiment of it’s vanishing. Hidden under the sheets are speakers playing love songs for the ice, while the glass plates collect various stories connected to possible futures surrounding the melting ice. Practices of »thought, love, rage and care«1, which come from various research about the desired object of the ice are collected on the paper. The video shows inhabitants of diverse species hatching an egg that traveled on an iceberg from the Pleistocene to an undefined present and/or future scenario in which odd companionships become possible. The t-shirt depicts the mural of the ice bird, the boat in which the first single-handed voyage to Antarctica was made. Another island is a collection of Swedish glass figures sold as souvenirs in which both humans and animals are trapped in ice-like shapes.
[1] Haraway, Donna J.: Staying with the Trouble – Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, Durham; London, 2016
Is It Love Or Cathexis, 2018
paper 150 x 200 cm, cold glass cast sculptures, t-shirt, cotton sheets 120 x 200 cm, glass plates 30 x 30 x 0,5 cm, video 5‘, sound 85‘+, books [All About Love; Bell Hooks, Against the Anthropocene; TJ Demos, Hyper Objects; Timothy Morton, The Terrestric Manifesto; Bruno Latour, Staying With the Trouble; Donna J. Haraway, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor; Rob Nixon]