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Amnesia

2009

Amnesia

2009

Amnesia

Detail, 2009

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Kunstverein Leipzig, Amnesia exhibition

2009

Draft

2009

A woodpecker on the laundry pole: a picture of a compulsive attachment to the wrong object.

A mechanical woodpecker was mounted onto an iron laundry pole. After triggering a sensor, the woodpecker pecks at the mast according to its natural behaviour (hits of up to 18 times per second).

Background  

When looking for food, male woodpeckers peck at resonant hollow spaces in trees – also to mark the boundaries of its territory through the (hopefully) loud reverberant sound of his pecking and thus to attract females. In today’s urban environment, hollow metal objects are often resorted to, such as rainwater pipes on houses. (The natural basis of wood is therefore increasingly becoming a disadvantage for competitors, forcing them to make adjustments.)

Although the woodpecker’s interest in sheet metal might be due to its inborn impulse, seeing a woodpecker pecking at the pole is entirely illogical for the observer. On the one hand, the woodpecker disappoints our expectations of nature through the uninhibited enhancement of its acoustic quality via technology (reason enough to rethink our ideas of nature). On the other hand, the image of its seemingly unnatural behaviour is intuitively seen as ambivalent. Animal behaviour is involuntarily humanised (a fundamentally questionable way of dealing with animals); one senses a possibly psychogenic disturbance – for example, amnesia. 

The naturalness with which the pecking behaviour simply continues, even after a transfer into an interior space, adds a trivial layer to the humanisation. The whole thing could be the motif of a greetings card: warm greetings from Amnesia.

Polyester belly, cast bronze feet

2009

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