Islands

About

In Josephine Baker’s installation at Kupfer, a series of interconnected islands, cut off from their mainland supply-chains, are quickly running out of resources. In their attempt to help create a new microclimate of dependency and sympoiesis, its occupants have stopped killing each other, and other forms of exchange have begun to emerge. The pyramid of need is being inverted. Water is overtaking the price of oil. Everything is becoming precious, and incalculable.

The islands are a physical metaphor for how the natural earth is represented in a capitalocentric world. They are landscapes constructed by the human imagination, with one objective: total harmony. Made from preformed ponds, trellises, shed roofs, and other gardening and landscaping materials, they occupy the overlap between the earth’s cyclical processes and its finite anthropic interpretations. Founded on separation, the islands continually strive toward their unity, yet they remain dispersed, imagined – almost out of existence. They are a bad story, badly retold. Paradise, overridden.