reNATURALIZE

Installation, 30 works on paper, each 58,5 x 78 cm, mounted on sandwich cardboard and hung in layers on top of each other, variable overall format, 2024

The world has become disposable. Heaven and Earth are nothing more than resources, transport routes and rubbish dumps. When we look up at the night sky, do we still see countless stars? We are in the midst of a global crisis, a crisis that no longer affects us through the media, but directly, at any time, permanently. Is this still a crisis or is it already the new normal? Could it be that labelling the situation a crisis only gives us the false hope that everything will soon be different, normal again? Just as wars have lost their beginning and their end, so too have crises. The destruction of the foundations of all living things and capitalism have been inextricably linked from the outset, and yet contemporary thinking is characterised by the feeling that capitalism is not only the only viable system, but also the only possible political and economic system. ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,’ writes Mark Fisher in his book “Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?”. Is our imagination already overwhelmed by what is normal? Let us imagine an Earth that is characterised neither by utopias nor dystopias, where the good life does not take place elsewhere, in the future, in the past or only in fiction. It is about finding a coherent alternative, delving even deeper into the possibilities of the imaginable, redefining the relationship with the earth not as a Green New Deal, but in a direct, caring relationship with each other. People, Earth, animals, plants.

reNATURALIZE considers ecology as embedded in everyday practices and actions. Rather than celebrating strategies of escapism, it attempts to root itself in the messy and complex realities of the ground on which we all stand. The everyday is at the centre of this work, the private - not in a voyeuristic sense in which the inside is turned inside out, but as an attempt to find and expand niches, in the sense of a mind-altering exercise.

reNATURALIZE is not a call to return to the good old days or to past world views, but the realisation that we always have to start again from scratch: Re-think, re-dream, reorganise, re-listen, re-collaborate. And presumably always anew.

The work reNATURALIZE consists of 30 sheets of paper and takes up individual aspects of the theme in key words. The individual works on paper are hung on top of each other, making the format variable. The content emerges over the course of time, from the examination of the theme, from conversations, from philosophy, from fleeting snatches of words. They do not form a coherent system, but rather a note and a reminder, a provocation to always be ready to think anew, to rethink, to re-examine one's thoughts and actions.