Seven Fruits from the Tree of Eternal Life

Seven Fruits from the Tree of Eternal Life

Production country: 
de
nl
Edition: 
1997
Format: 
installation

In the centre of the installation, a loaf of bread is lying on a pedestal. To the right and left of it, there Is a selection of different kinds of fruits and vegetables, which are connected to each other by cables. In the background, behind this test set-up, there are different monitors to which the exact, graphic slices of these exhibited objects, as produced by nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (NMRI, computer tomography) have been transmitted. High above this scenario, large size monitors document this same procedure on the human body. Dimly lit, the room strikes the visitor as being a mysterious secret laboratory. There are many unfamiliar things for the viewer to discover. The bread, the most omnipresent of our basic foods, which Rotraut Pape has made to resemble more the form and colour of a car battery, feeds energy to all the vegetative cells. The potential drop between the plus and minus poles recurrently generates and regenerates the system from one moment to the next, and enables reactions in the interplay of the smallest elements. Hence the apparent power reserves in the sunflower seed - nuclear energy - bread [in German: Kern = seed, core, heart, nucleuslnuciear; hence nuclear energy] distribute themselves to the other particles in the food stuff supply and set off almost indiscernible transformation processes. The artist documents these mutations by giving them very individual names: e.g. Mono-lone and Atom-elone or Prote- gine and Morf-ine. And even more cynical are the nuclear magnetic resonance images on the monitors which further heighten the viewer's chains of associations and possibilities of combination. Thus even the untrained eye discovers that the heart of things does not unequivocally correspond to its outer form: the audio cassette as the inside of a melon, or fishbones and computer chips instead of the inside of an eggplant. Eclipsing all of these, two life-size video projections of the almost superhumanlooking test persons present a new form in each new vertical slice. The 30- raster of the reconstruction of the volumes, which has been superposed onto the horizontal NMRIs, documents both a female and a male representative as a component of evolutionary processes. Simultaneously, humanity puts itself in a daring position, allowing itself to make operations and interventions in the evolutionary development of things, until it is able to recreate itself in accordance with its own image. Fruits, vegetables, pedestal, 7 monitors, 2 video projections, 9 video channels, 9 audio channels

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