Christoph Weber

Christoph Weber drops a limestone from a height of about three meters onto a not yet hardened concrete pour. The stone is a recently blasted lump from the Mannersdorf limestone quarry and is normally further crushed, ground, and turned into cement clinker from the associated cement factory - a CO2-intensive chemical process that makes the global cement industry a climate polluter and that made the material concrete one of the essential markers of the Anthropocene due to its inflationary use. In a gesture formally reminiscent of the force of bursting, Weber confronts the material concrete with its own raw material, limestone, and juxtaposes the natural form of the lump of stone with the geometry of the cuboid. The industrial form collapses even before it is realized, not as a material creation of a modernist utopian form of use, but on the one hand as a dystopian image of a systemic failure in principle, and on the other hand as a call to action.