Carbon 12 - Gestures of Resistance
Chell, Edward (2017) Carbon 12 - Gestures of Resistance. [Exhibition/show, Installation, Public art, Site-specific work]
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Gestures of Resistance was curated by Jean Wainwright and originated as part of the School of Fine Art & Photography's newly emerging creative identity. In Gestures of Resistance, artworks by sixteen international contemporary artists were exhibited at the Romantso Cultural Centre in Athens during Documenta 14 from 20 April to 30 April 2017.
Carbon-12 was originally part of the group exhibition Drive Thru held at the Cavendish Square Car Park in West London during Frieze Week, 2016.
Accounting for the urban context of this car centred site, the installation consisted of twelve manufactured car number plates detailing the UN’s twelve most threatened global tree species. These were mounted on the concrete walls like signs designating personalised parking spaces, using fonts specific to ‘show plates’ used in the automobile industry often on customised cars.
In terms of resistance, here we have two extremes pitted against each other: species bordering on extinction through man made, often commercial / environmental interactions with a potent visual symbol of one of the worlds indices of freedom and emancipation and yet the most pervasive and environmentally damaging of instruments – the automobile.
The world’s most endangered species is the aptly named Bastard Gum Tree. There are only two survivors in existence – both on opposite sides of the same island, St Helena, in the middle of the Atlantic and still a remote outpost of a dwindled one-time British empire. Kew Garden’s seed bank located at Wakehurst Place collected seeds to germinate. St Helena is an essay in environmental degradation. The island has now in some eastern slopes been largely overrun with Jute, an imported species used in rope production (the last factories here closed in the 1970’s) and many more rare species specific to this habitat are clinging on to ever shrinking bits of available ground. One such is a species of daisy that grows into a tree – a tree daisy, a most unlikely species imaginable.
The plates are manufactured to the standard UK size in laminated plastic. The piece is flexible enough to be configured in a range of different ways from a single cluster to a linear installation, clustered in groups and scattered like seeds or germinating weeds around an exhibition.
Originally configured in a different way as part of the group exhibition Drive Thru curated by Peter Fillingham and Roger Clark.
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