Installation

Kryptonale 10

Berlin, September 2004

Concept: ka (Bartram & Peters)
Speaker: Björn Ole Blunck
Soundmaterial: Andreas Peters

Spoken information text (component of the installation):

Sugar, sweet gold, symbol of luck and joy, wealth and abundance. So at least up to the 19. Century sugar in Europe was a luxurious exquisiteness, that only could afford empires. With the introduction of the industrial production of sugar sugar beets could consume sugar then admittedly also wider social layers regularly, its symbol content, the sugar didn't lose completely meanwhile. According to sweetening we still today festive occasions, be it with the wedding pie, the birthday cake and one thinks of the all around sweet seductions for Christmas and Easter.
However, the development of the sugar of the object of the everyday necessity in Europe was not synonymous with his/its global development. So, sugar still remained long a luxury property in other sharing of the world. Even today, the sugar consumption is quite differently world-wide and this not only for culturally conditional reasons. Is consumed 37 kg of sugar per head in Germany in the year so, while the per capita consumption amounts to exactly 6,9 kg in Ghana per year.

Sugar as symbol of this, carefree life sweetens and was impulse for this installation, caused through an occurrence on a bazaar in Damaskus. As thanks for the purchase of a larger quantity of seasonings and tea, that we wanted to take to Germany as well, gave us the salesperson a carton of rock candy. A mendicant child would have this loving gladly had, we rather wanted the sugar pole, however, as memory take with home, la dolce vita, some have it, some not.

The symbolic and sensual work of the topic of the different material basic prerequisite, among others resultant in an unequal distribution of goods of the everyday necessity, stands in the center of the installation La Dolce Vita.
In the middle of the locked up surface lying before them, a sack is fortified fine sugar with 37 kg at a rope of the blanket down. A small hole is at one of the low corners of the sack so that the sugar trickles out over a time period here of several days. He/it falls of standing sheet metal bowls, to which the sugar rises pyramidal, in a field under it. This way, the middle bowl becomes the most and this about him/it around gets along bowls filled with increasing distance fewer until not at all.
The impact of the trickling crystals is recorded with microphones, that hang over the middle bowls, and over which reinforces installation electro-acoustically 8 channels. The permanent sound, that is created here, filled with it the entire area.