06. Floating Fathers (2024-in progress)
Location: Freiburg im Breisgau, DE, Budapest, HU, Belgrade, RS
The project is commissioned by DELPHI Art Space, Art Quarter Budapest, and U10 Art Space Belgrade.
Deep Time Agency has been selected as one of the participating artists in the Your Water Our Water exhibition cycle, taking place throughout 2024 in three art spaces along the Donau river. For the project, Deep Time Agency has been concerned with the critical rethinking of objects used in the “renaturalisation” of the Danube river, “making-up” for the river’s canalisation practice in relation to shipping and hydro-energy.
We are especially interested in the idea of using so-called “Raubäume;’’ dead trees that are artificially introduced to the riverbed to make it look natural again.
Our idea merged the industrial “founding fathers” of the modern Danube with the material entity of the Raubäume, transforming them into “floating fathers.” The exhibition on view in the three exhibition venues showed several smaller maquette prototypes that formed the basis for a larger sculpture in public space, that was brought back to the Danube river during a performance in Belgrade, held in December 2024.
During the performance at U10 Art Space, Deep Time Agency took the public on a guided tour through the city centre of Belgrade and down to the Danube river, accompanied by a larger scale model of one of their floating fathers: István Széchenyi (1791–1860). During the walk, the public acquired insights into the history of the Danube river, learning more about its construction history.
The project, that is also on show at the exhibition, critically commemorates 19th century industrialists, engineers, and statesmen that played an important role in the cultivation and canalisation of the Danube river. While the taming of the river was seen as a heroic deed just hundred years ago, nowadays we face the direct and indirect consequences of these historical figures’ actions, and many ecological projects concerned with “re-wildering” the Danube are currently under way. As part of these re-wildering projects dead trees are placed in the riverbed to restore a deep time image of the Danube. With their project, DTA thinks about the role of the sculptures of the historical statesmen in these practices, reuniting them with the contemporary river in new and exciting ways.
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