12/9/2002
Kakteenhaus
Portikus, Frankfurt
Under the title "Kakteenhaus / Cactus House", Simon Starling transforms the exhibition space of Portikus into a greenhouse. A heating system developed for the installation raises the room temperature accordingly. This heating system consists of a Volvo engine.
Simon Starling
KAKTEENHAUS
September 14 - October 20, 2002
Exhibition opening on Friday, September 13, 2002, at 8 p.m.
Invitation to a conversation with the press on Friday, September 13, 2002 at 11 a.m.
The artist will be present.
Under the title "Kakteenhaus / Cactus House", Simon Starling transforms the
exhibition space of Portikus into a greenhouse. A heating system developed for
the installation raises the room temperature accordingly. This heating system
consists of a Volvo engine. The vehicle itself, which stands in the back of
Portikus, is connected to the engine via the necessary conduits such as petrol
tube, radiator hoses, exhaust pipe and electrical wiring. The engine is started
from inside the automobile. All connections to the engine are merely extended in
a way so that the heat released across the distance is passed on to the space.
Using this principle, ideal conditions are created in the exhibition space to
temporarily accommodate a large cactus, which prior to the start of the
exhibition travelled from southern Spain to Frankfurt in precisely this red
Volvo.
Simon Starling tells stories with his works. Time and again, he displays widely
encompassing interconnections between places, objects, cultural and historical
facts. Starling himself takes on the role of a literary narrator who never
reveals the point of the story directly, but rather takes the long route or
chooses a detour in order to then represent a network of relations in an often
absurd reduction.
The starting-point of his exhibition at Portikus is the Andalusian Tabernas
Desert, located about 30 kilometres north of AlmerÃa. The almost
12,000-hectare-large and constantly spreading expanse between the mountains of
Los Lilabres and Alhamilla is considered Europe's only true desert. Its history
is characterised by numerous attempts to make it cultivatable. In the 60s and
70s, the area was an ideal location for shooting westerns and became extremely
well-known on account of Sergio Leone's so-called spaghetti westerns. Three film
studios that today mainly serve as tourist attractions bear witness to this era.
Cactuses, which actually do not belong to Europe's vegetation, but which since
the 15th century were brought home by Spanish conquistadores as popular
presents, were imported for the scenery of films such as "The Good, the Bad and
the Ugly" and nowadays belong to the landscape of the Tabernas Desert. While in
the past only a few oases allowed for growing tropical fruits, in the last
decades the large-scale cultivation of vegetables, fruits and flowers under huge
plastic tarpaulins has been established. The produce is profitably exported to
northern Europe. The wasteful irrigation of seedlings and plants in this
infertile region and the lowering of the groundwater table caused by this,
however, have led to an alarming expansion of the desert. At the same time, the
Tabernas Desert with its more than 3,000 hours of sunshine a year is home to the
most important European solar energy research centre, the Plataforma Solar de
AlmerÃa. In co-operation with the Deutsche Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt
(German Aerospace Centre) the profitability of exporting solar energy to Germany
is currently being assessed. In addition, the Plataforma Solar operates a large
desalinization plant for sea water serving agriculture.
With his installation at Portikus, Simon Starling succeeds in addressing all
these different aspects of the Tabernas Desert in the contradictory relationship
between an automobile engine and a cactus. The desert is nature's most recent
ecosystem, and the cactus counts as the youngest and most economical plant the
flora has brought forth. The combustion engine, on the other hand, which after
over a hundred years is still utilised by the automobile industry, is
characterised by enormous inefficiency. Only around thirty percent of the
combusted resources are transformed into kinetic energy - the rest is released
as heat. In the exhibition "Kakteenhaus", the cactus finds its life-saving
counterpart precisely in the automobile engine with its waste of energy. In
addition, the journey of the cactus from Texas or Arizona to Spain and from
there finally inside the Volvo to Frankfurt can be interpreted as a metaphor of
a society that aims at making everything possible everywhere, be it the scenery
for a western in AlmerÃa, agriculture under plastic tarpaulins or the Tabernas
desalinization plant.
Simon Starling (* 1967) lives and works in Glasgow.
The exhibition is supported by the Kulturstiftung der Deutschen Bank
as well as The British Council and the Alfred Ritter GmbH & Co. KG
Opening hours:
Daily, except Monday, 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Wednesday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Admission free
Portikus
Schoene Aussicht 2 D-60311, Frankfurt
49 069 21998760