This Installation was made for Museum Het Valkhof, Nijmegen (NL). The installation was part of the group-exhibition ‘Liquid mountain’, The second part of ‘Dossier plastic’. 

‘Out to sea’: a reality check
The travelling exhibition called ‘Out to Sea?’ was designed by the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich. It confronts us with the consequences of using plastics and shows us that we will need a great deal of creativity to tackle the problem.

‘Liquid mountain’: visions of the natural versus the artificial
The second part of ‘Dossier plastic’ is ‘Liquid mountain’. ‘Liquid mountain’ encourages us to look at the issue of plastic waste from a different and broader perspective based on contemporary art. Guest curators Heske ten Cate and Hanne Hagenaars chose the laboratory – the source of the material – as their point of departure. That is where plastics originated and it may also possibly be where creative solutions can be thought up. After all, the problems are caused not so much by the materials themselves as by the actions of humans.

The guest curators invited the artists Anna Bak, Paul Beumer, Karin van Dam and Müge Yilmaz to use their own visions of “the natural versus the artificial” to create a statement in laboratory format.

About the Installation

Monday, August 8th this year, the world ran out of resources. "Earth Overshoot Day" is a day that has been measured and calculated every 5th years since 1971. The day marks the time mankind's consumption of biological resources exceeds what the planet can replenish annually. August 8^th, - four months before the end of the year, we have already used a whole year's worth of the world's resources . For the rest of 2016, we are living on borrowed resources from future generations.
Global Footprint Network (GFN), a California-based think tank, calculates Earth Overshoot Day by comparing the planet's biocapacity (the amount of the biological resources the Earth are able to generate in one year). According to data from GFN the world has entered the "biological debt" earlier and earlier since the 1970s. In 1971 Earth Overshoot Day was on December 24^th.

We are dependent on nature in many ways, most prominent need is food resources. But we are strangling, exhausting our food source. We are consuming ferocious, completely incomprehensive of natures fragility. We expect nature to develop as fast as us, evolve into some kind of super nature that easily can reestablish itself, fight of infections and be more effective and productive. Growth regulators and genetic modification has already been in use for decades to compensate for our needs. Is this enough, and do we know the consequences of this. Do we need to find alternative resources to survive, a complete artificial replacement for nature maybe? Or maybe in the future, we will have to survive from spirituality.

Link to the film that was a part of the installation: https://vimeo.com/198658326