Mannersdorf limestone chunk with drilled hole, concrete
Overall dimensions approx. (H)64 x 650 x 200 cm
In Voracious Flux, a formal connection between extraction and material flow is initially established by matching the diameter of the borehole and the thickness of the concrete worm. The hose used for the extraction of cement and now concreted into oversized worms can be read as a voracious flow of material in extractivist societies. Several thousand tons of limestone are blasted out of the Leitha Mountains every day for cement production, fired at 1450° C with the addition of clay to form cement clinker and finally ground into cement. Limestone extraction represents one of the largest mass movements in industrial processing, the effects on biodiversity are serious and the CO2 emissions of the cement industry amount to around 7% of global CO2 emissions.
Since 2020, the global stock of man-made mass has exceeded the total sum of biomass on Earth – around 90 percent of which is building materials. In the project Reverse Imagining Vienna, two sculptors and nine writers took a Viennese Gründerzeit building and the Prater Bridge, which crosses over the Danube, as material and speculative anchors in which to gain perspectives on sustainable relationships with inanimate matter. Referring to so-called reverse engineering, the two structures were deconstructed and recomposed in a historical, material-analytical, poetic and visionary way using reverse imagining.
Solnhofen limestone slab from the generally accessible floor area of the investigated Gründerzeit house, steel rod (drill extension for extraction blast holes in the Mannersdorf limestone quarry), rubber wedge, wooden wedge
Overall dimensions approx. (H)374 x 210 x 40 cm
support connects the concrete of the bridge with the floor slabs of the house - the Mannersdorf limestone from cement production with the Solnhofen slab limestone from southern Germany. In Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s text about the Gründerzeithaus, Favoritenstraße is torn into several sections by torrential rain in the year 2436. “Only the paved sidewalks (supported by long iron bars) are still there.” The work refers to this and clamps a floor slab from the Gründerzeit house with a used steel rod from the quarry in Mannersdorf from below against a beam and a wall in the exhibition space. The rod is an extension for the drill used to drill holes 10 cm thick and up to 20 m deep into the limestone mountain, into which the explosives for the extraction are placed.
The gesture of pressing also refers to the other typical use of Solnhofen slab limestone - lithography.