Ana Mendes, Artificial Natur, detail, courtesy of the artist 2019.
Born Tomar, Portugal (1973), lives and works in London, United Kingdom and Stockholm, Sweden
Artificial Natur 2019
Mixed technique – silk, wood, natural and artificial dyes
Courtesy of the artist
Artificial Nature is an installation in the public space in which Mendes questions the concept of nature in a post-digital society. The wood of our desk or the scren of the laptop? The sunlight or the smartphone light? And what happens to the public space, where organic waste is mixed with cables, carbord and glass? How does it impact our memory of the city. In this work, Mendes collected all the materials found in the publis space in Seoul, extracted the natural dyes and used them to dye a collection of silk flags, which are displayed in the public space, until time of human action takes them. Thus, time and memory vanish together.
The work was dispatched (smuggled) from Seoul to Lagos, via London, using multiple carriers. This process mimicked old colonial routes, such as the Silk Road, in which goods travelled from the East to the West.
