Crushed Cayenne

source: koebberlingkaltwasser

Fundholz
Reclaimed construction timber
450 x 650 x 200 cm
Club Transmediale, Berlin
Haus der Architektur, Graz (AT)
Im vergrößerten Maßstab 1,2:1 bauten wir aus Fund­holz den Frontalzusammenstoß zweier Porsche Ca­yenne nach. Das Publikum konnte sich in die beiden ineinander verkeilten Holzautowracks setzen. Mit der Form dieses Unfallszenarios wählten wir eine Ästhetik, die die hermetische, brutalhedonis­tische Ideologie von Luxusgeländeautos dieser Art konterkariert. Durch die Darstellung ihrer Zerstö­rung erlangen sie eine skulpturale Offenheit und Vieldeutigkeit, die ihrem panzerähnlichen Original­aussehen in unzerstörtem Zustand entgegensteht. Wenn man aber das Wesen der Zerstörung auf­greift, das diese Autos prägt, kann man feststellen, dass erst im Unfall mit Totalschaden die vulgäre An­mut eines Porsche Cayenne ihre ekstatische Vollen­dung erreicht. Crushed Cayenne is a 1.2:1 scale mockup of two proprietary SUVs on a full frontal collision course. The public was invited to take seats inside the wooden wrecks wrenched into each other. The sculpture provides an ironic commentary on the seemingly indomitable and hedonistic allure of these cars. The ambiguous frailty and accessibility of the sculpture representing their destruction were in stark contrast to the familiar tank-like look of these cars – intact – in real life. SUVs with their military origin have an inherent menacing allure. The intrinsic vulgar excess of a Porsche Cayenne really comes into its own when it is destroyed in a heavy crash.
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source: goethede

Public space is under siege: pressure to consume, growing control and more and more traffic are threatening to change the picture of our cities dramatically. The couple Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser have been elaborating their idea of an artistic and architectonical aesthetics of resistance against this take-over since 1998.

They confront consumerist ideologies with alternatives: structural intervention, artistic statements, actions and theories. In doing so, the artists make use of streets, squares, bridges, parks and interiors as operational spaces. And the material they use is always obtained from urban resources: things that have been thrown away, garbage, donated things.

Between January and March 2009 Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser were MeetFactory residents through the Goethe-Institut Prague. In collaboration with autonomous Prague biking organizations they presented their project White Trash. A wooden replica of a fancy upper class SUV, before being installed in the streets of Berlin, was shown in Prague in a new arrangement: penetrated by a concrete pile.
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source: raumsichtenorg

Folke Köbberling was born 1969 in Kassel and currently lives in Berlin.
Martin Kaltwasser was born 1965 in Munster and currently lives in Berlin.
Köbberling studied at the University of Fine Arts in Kassel and the Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design in Vancouver. Kaltwasser studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nurnberg and architecture at the University of Applied Sciences in Berlin.

The artists frequently utilise residual materials collected from the waste containers of urban construction sites – or, in other words, the used, worn out or cast away leftovers of the city’s ongoing urban redevelopment. They process the remnants of the planning processes into new forms. The artist duo view the city not as a linear development towards a codified ideal condition, but rather as a continual process of change that is shaped by both the participation within it as well as by the passage of time, the coincidental and the provisional. The acquisition of the materials as well as the »occupation« of spaces is a demonstration of their critical participation in urban development processes. For their 2008 sculpture »White Trash«, for example, they built a white SUV (fig.) out of found materials and then parked it on Berliner Strasse, a highly busy street in Berlin. Over time, the effigy of a polluting status symbol became increasingly unattractive and an ever-more accurate reflection of its eponymous name.
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source: artbook

Garbage dump or gold mine? The German artistic collaborators Martin Kaltwasser and Folke Köbberling see rubbish as a major resource. Their projects colonize public space in the name of recycling and design: Overnight, they can make pavilions, villages of huts and even whole houses appear. In installations, exhibitions and, most frequently, guerrilla architectural interventions, they question the conditions of urban life as determined by privatization. For example, in a 2004 project called “Hausbau,” they built a house in front of West Berlin’s infamous Gropius-designed, failed-utopia high-rise development, Gropiustadt, and moved their family into it for a one week stay; for 2005’s “Kleinod,” they built a bridge and a stairway between a local family’s home and a nearby community garden. In City as a Resource: One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure, Köbberling and Kaltwasser propose simple ways of livening up and re-appropriating the urban habitat with sly alternatives to conventional urban planning.