At Gluon’s ArtSpace we host a window presentation by Lola Daels. Le Vrai Fake II is the continuation of a previous work. It pictures a ceramic irrigation system carrying sculptures. In this installation Daels questions the role of authenticity by reproducing a stone, found in the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco. While some of the copies are worth more than the original, the value of the authentic was lost. The stone’s origins were lost and among its copies, it received a new identity. Years later a feeling of guilt arose, taking the stone away from it’s origins to an unknown environment. While searching for explanations for this bizarre sentiment towards a stone, she decided to dig deeper into the genesis and the history of this stone. Through research of the political and geological issues of its original habitat, Daels decided to return the stone to where it came from, and together with it, a gesture of hope and life. Therefore she reproduced the stone again, this time with clay, earth and seeds. With this project she wants to highlight the problem of desertification today. Desertification is the expansion or creation of deserts resulting from climate change and erosion through poor landscape management. Every year water stress worsens life in the villages, slowly creating inhabitable areas. One of the strategy to protect the land from drying out, or even to restore a desert landscape, is to grow forests. Therefore Lola Daels created sculptures using the seed bomb technique*. These sculptures will bloom once the’re in contact with water.
* Seedbombing is the practice of introducing vegetation to land by throwing seed balls. The clay stores the seeds, and protects them against the external world. It gives them all the time they need in order to grow with the exact conditions they prefer.
ABOUT
Lola Prima Donna Daels (°1990) is a Brussels based artist. Daels mostly creates site specific art, which derives from long processes of research, testing and feeling. While searching to create tension with the context, her work can take any shape and place that it needs. From every place that she visites, she collects objects. She reshapes them and integrates them into new contexts. Doing so, she poses analytical and critical inquiries about ecological, environmental and socio-political issues from it’s surrounding reality.
www.chepascollective.be
