Zernetzung

Marco Di Carlo

In everything our world is networked. We live on a planet and experience how fruitful and at the same time unpredictable global exchange is. Flora and fauna, water, air, oceans, climate and of course people and their goods circulate; and this – as it has been the case for centuries – is also accompanied by pathogens. Structures of all kinds form and network and are in permanent contact. Parallel to this, processes of decomposition are constantly taking place, for life is change and a constant coexistence of beginning and end.

The sculptor Marco Di Carlo (born 1980) pervades the Museum for Sepulchral Culture with structures made of cables and objects as part of the final exhibition of his Georg Meistermann Fellowship. He incorporates organic material from found objects into his work and arranges his installations as a symbolic coexistence of interpenetrating nature, technology and culture. Wood, bones or furs regain moments of their vitality in a fantastic way through their integration into a fabric of cables and electronic components.

Di Carlo's works play with the ambivalence of our existence. We perceive death and life as different states, but from an evolutionary perspective these two categories so familiar to us make little sense, because so-called life consists simultaneously of countless processes of networking and decomposition of molecules. Human beings are part of this and do the same with these processes. The human being uses his abilities as a homo faber, as a creating and therein inventing living being, but the arrogance of the technically creating leads him again and again to the limits of the possible.

In the realization of human limitations towards nature and the cosmos there is the chance of humility towards our existence, which can only be borne in a holistic understanding of the world. And so we too network and disintegrate in the hope of mental, aesthetic or technical developments. These hopefully do not only lead us to the edge of exhaustion, but in the acceptance of our finiteness let us also understand and celebrate life in its essence. We are finite because we live, and we create because the awareness of our finiteness enables us to do so.