The saved garbage becomes art for the apocalypse – Culture and pleasure

Old doors, locks, a freezer and a mounted canoe – these are some of the things that the sculptor and video artist Éva Mag has collected from his father’s farm in Åkersberga. The exhibition “There is a plan for this” took shape when the artist was thinking of cleaning up his parents.

But I forgot there was a man there and it was Dad’s stuff. Over time, I have developed a respect for how he thinks about things, she says.

Recently he was walking with his father in the showroom, and it was “like walking in his brain,” says Éva Mag. All things had a function. The work has been emotional on a private level, but the exhibition is also about our contemporary history.

It is like observing the evolution of civilization, but in a large pile of junk. So many new things are produced so badly that you can’t even catch up on old ones.

Survival system

Among the gadgets, for example, there is an old shed that the father has wanted to break for 25 years, and various metals that can be sold at a price of a kilo. Everything has a value, if you put it right, says Éva Mag. Knowledge of the different systems determines how we manage to find a place there, and thus survive.

It is not so easy to handle. And if you come from another country and you have to start from the beginning, you have a longer starting distance, “she says.

Éva Mag was born in Transylvania, Romania, and came here when she was ten years old. As an artist, you have always felt bad about figurative painting. But he got the talent from his parents, who worked as tailors. From pattern designs, he began to create cloth bodies.

Using sculptures primarily of cloth and clay, he explores the function of the body and how it is valued in society. The sculptures are often elaborate, in exposed positions.

The bodies lie on the ground and do not rise. I’ve been thinking a lot about this move. The image of the person standing on his own legs is someone with a spine. But if everything breaks, you fall, she says.

Fear a confinement

The exhibition shows a video of the installation “Dead matters Moves”, made at a performance festival in the United States. There, Éva Mag leads the dancers to help move the bodies. In clay figures they can represent their wishes.

Reflections on what keeps us in adversity unite the exhibition, and Éva Mag believes that the thoughts became eerily relevant during the isolation of the crown crisis.

Not moving is terrible in any way. Movement is natural. So what keeps everyone awake now is the hope that we will soon leave our apartments.

The crisis has made Éva Mag realize that her father is self-sufficient. He has taken care of things and seen opportunities and functions where others see trash. “There is a plan for this” is his word.

People who collect things like this, or who, like Dad, have the idea of ​​being able to manage themselves, it depends on them that we can all go if the apocalypse comes, because there is a wood stove and things that you can reuse. Not stated, but there is an environmental mindset in self-reliance.