Clockwork

Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck's installation Clockwork, examines how the physical manifestations of past and future artificially interact with one another through the manipulation of humans. Fragments from various man-made constructions, stones taken from nature which had been formed into geometrical––primarily rectangular––shapes by human action for the purpose of building architecture, were collected as the two artists mapped urban environments through their materiality. A city’s narrative is told through its rock and soil as they act simultaneously as a storage of natural and cultural history: from earth to brick and from brick to culture. Twelve concrete mixers arranged in a circle accelerate the omnipresent process of decay as they return the blocks’ unnaturally constructed angles to rounded forms. The mixers create a team of “erosion-machines,” subverting their original purpose by creating objects of a post-human condition linked to a past natural-state.