Spending more time with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides – Potato
January 6, 2025Spending more time with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides – Felt
January 13, 2025Looking closer at Potatotemporal
As an artwork, Potatotemporal includes 18 potatoes made from 9 materials, plus 2 real potatoes.
When on site at Atelier LUMA for the Sustainable Institution residency, artist and filmmaker Agnès Varda’s exhibition Patatutopia was on display in the Frank Gehry-designed LUMA Gallery. The exhibition included more than 600kg of potatoes, something we knew presented a conservation challenge for the gallery. With permission, our team removed two potatoes from the exhibition which then became a touch point for the rest of the project.
As one of the potatoes from the Varda exhibition began to sprout, a cast was made, allowing the replication (cloning) of the original potatoes in different materials. Potatotemporal is the resulting artwork that includes potatoes made from 9 materials: Clay; Felt; Salt; Paper Pulp; Tree of Heaven (wood); Sunflower marrow; Mycelium; PLA (algae-based bioplastic); Hempcrete/cement; Potato.
The potatoes will be carefully documented and artificially aged so that we can track the impact of time on each material. Over time guides will be completed for each of the materials as part of The Fiction of Permanence: Material Guides – dedicated to understanding the degradation of a single material through a case study.
Scroll through for a close up look at the materials the CSC is spending time considering.
1: Potato
2: Felt
3: PLA (algae-based bioplastic)
4: Clay
5: Paper pulp
6: Sunflower marrow
7: Mycelium
8: Tree of Heaven (wood)
9: Salt
Missing material: Hempcrete.
Objects as Temporal Entities is a project developed by the Centre for Sustainable Curating with members of the Synthetic Collective as a part of the Sustainable Institution (TSI). The TSI programme is an artist-in-residence programme by LUMA Arles (Atelier LUMA), the E-WERK Luckenwalde, and Rupert Centre for Art and Education. It is co-funded by the European Union, Teltow Flaming and Lithuanian Culture Council.