SUPERFLEX

The work on view in the exhibition ‘Boil the Ocean’ asks us to imagine what happens and how we act now that we are at the boiling point –besides the destruction of mankind, what might be birthed from the boiling seas?

SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces. Working in and outside the physical location of the exhibition space, SUPERFLEX has been engaged in major public space projects since their award-winning ‘Superkilen’ opened in 2011. These projects often involve participation, involving the input of local communities, specialists, and children. Taking the idea of collaboration even further, recent works have involved soliciting the participation of other species. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, aiming to move society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best idea might come from a fish. Many of the most recent SUPERFLEX projects have been engaging with the impending climate disaster and the destruction of the environment as we know it. Humans have roamed this planet for a mere 300,000 years – less than 0.01 % of the Earth’s history. During our relatively short stay, we have managed to create a footprint on the entire ecosystem comparable to that of major natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteor impacts.

In anticipation of a future altered by climate change, SUPERFLEX created ‘Dive-In’, an encounter across time, elements, and species, constructing an architectural vocabulary fit for a new era of submersion – in preparation of a mass migration from the sea to the land—an era of fish. In other works, the collective engages with a dystopian future that seems to approach as the end of the human era draws nearer. Even as large areas of land are submerged by rising seas, Earth has transgressed limits and redefined itself again and again and will most likely do so in a post-human era. As part of these investigations, SUPERFLEX created a series of light works reminiscent of the commercial signage frequently found in urban landscapes and generally located on the tops of façades or buildings, ‘We Are All In The Same Boat’, ‘Come Hell’ or ‘High Water’, ‘Boil the Ocean’ and others. The artists translate a familiar phrase into a text-based installation, consisting of an illuminated signboard made with ocean-blue or magna-red LED letters mounted on an aluminum frame.  These works invite the viewer to reflect upon our present role in the escalation of climate change, to acknowledge our communal and shared experience within this reality, consider a potentially apocalyptic scenario, and eventually imagine a future world. The epoch where we took center stage – the Anthropocene – is coming to an end, but other species will take the spotlight and inhabit our infrastructure once we are gone. New life will flourish, with or without us. As our surroundings are changing at an increasing pace, we seem unable to change our behavior and patterns of consumption. Perhaps our footprint on this planet has already set an inevitable course from which it is too late to deviate. Perhaps we overestimate our ability to self-preserve. Regardless, the evolution of planet Earth continue.