Aluminati

Location Reykjavik, Iceland | Client Reykjavik Art Museum | Size 200 square meters | Status Completed 2008 | Tags Culture and Art

This large outdoor art installation was a huge black box is entitled “I Hate Nature / ‘Aluminati’”. It encouraged debate on the delusion that the world has limitless natural resources to be exploited.

Visitors walked into a box in the front courtyard of the museum. As they moved along the corridor inside, they looked through a series of frames onto an internal core space of crinkled, industrial aluminium, open to the sky.

The black interior space made it hard to work out the shape and size of the area - there were no references to scale. The core was a sharp contrast: dazzlingly bright in the sunlight and changing over the course of the day, but with limited views through the shaped frames.

The subject of the installation was the aluminium itself. From inside the black box, it was both mesmerising and repulsive.

Aluminium in Iceland was, at the time of the installation, a highly controversial product, formed from a smelting process which released significant CO2. The seductively shiny product belied the environmental cost of the country’s economic dependence on aluminium.

The piece asked visitors to assess their views of nature as a fantasy, an attractive commodity inserted in bits and pieces into the environment we have constructed around ourselves. ‘Nature’ is challenging: it includes germs, spiders and earthquakes. The difference between what we say about the natural world and what we actually do, along with our misconception about our place in nature, prevents us from having a healthy attitude to the built environment. This in turn makes it hard to find ways to resolve the impacts of human activity upon the natural world.

The piece, 14m wide x 14m long x 5m high, was revealed at the Reykjavik Art Museum in May 2008 as part of a wider event entitled the Experiment Marathon Reykjavik.

For more information, see the Reykjavik Art Museum website. (Icelandic aluminium has now largely moved to being smelted using hydroelectric and geothermal power.)