Rikke Luther, a research affiliate of the ACT, recently had her film, Concrete Nature, featured in the 10th Göteborg International Biennial For Contemporary Art Opening Days Program in Sweden.
In her work, Luther explores how various interactive systems such as language, politics, law, and economics influence the way we relate to the natural world. Her latest series of artworks deals with the extraction of sand, one of our era’s greatest environmental threats, and a fundamental component in the production of both concrete and digital technologies. Luther’s work illustrates how the philosophical, scientific, and legal systems that separate nature from culture are preconditions for the industrial extraction of the raw materials on which the expansion of urbanized society depends. In its wake, the habitats of many of the organisms at the foundation of the food chain are being undermined. At Göteborgs Konsthall, GIBCA is also screening the film Concrete Nature, in which Luther explores concrete’s political and aesthetic history in relation to modernist architecture.
Concrete Nature: The Planetary Sand Bank (Trailer).
Luther’s story weaves together historical pictures with newly filmed material from places such as New York, London, and MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The story unfolds from the “discovery” of concrete in the early nineteenth century and its connections to modernist ideology to contemporary plans to build 3D-printed concrete settlements in space.
