Hörner / Antlfinger «Dream Water Wonderland»
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Hörner / Antlfinger (FRG): Dream Water Wonderland, 2010 (Videostill)
Dream Water Wonderland
Installation, 2010
Looking at the work of the artist duo Hörner/Antlfinger you can get dizzy: your eye follows a swing, high up in the air, circling the rims of a gigantic crater, the horizon swaying, you can sense the depth. The black-and-white video footage is accompanied by screaming and cheering. This dizzying carousel ride is projected into a plexiglass cube. In front of the picture, there is a strange plastic tower on a record player, incessantly rotating. What is perceived to be a tower at first, extends beneath the device and turns out to be sort of a model. It is the 3D object of the pit Asse II in Lower Saxony (FRG) that had been in use as final deposal site for nuclear waste and was closed in 1978 for security reasons and due to contamination incidents. You are getting dizzier and dizzier as the model keeps circling, kept in motion by a record player, a Beogramm 4000, that was brought on the market in 1972, then a futuristic high-tech device only very few could afford. It was also in 1972 that they started building the fast breeder reactor in Kalkar, Lower Rhine, then symbolising the promise of “clean, efficient energy”. Due to multiple security risks it actually never went up to the net and was turned into an amusement park in the 1990s, where you now can get on a flying swing in the former cooling tower of the nuclear power plant. When you approach the installation object consisting of the model, the video projection, and the record player, a female voice starts telling a dream of strange creatures looking like puppet birds coming from the recent past, settling down in our houses like parasites, drawing off immense amounts of electricity via TV channels – without us realising that that’s consuming our own resources. Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger mirror the former technological utopian dream as nightmare of today’s spectacle generation and question the gain in wealth by drawing attention to its underexposed costs.
link: / h--a.org