Ant Farm Berlin - Tom Bogaert
Tom Bogaert ( Belgium )
‘Ant Farm Berlin’ is about “the city as a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux.” It is the third iteration of a project that started with an ‘ArtSchool Palestine’ residency in Nablus in 2011, where Tom Bogaert mapped remnants of ‘inverse geometry’ as described by Eyal Weizman in his ‘Walking Through Walls.’ It might take the form of a large-scale map of Berlin in various shades of field-gray made of translucent ‘agar-agar’ – a vegetarian gelatin substitute to which he adds a minimal amount of beer. The installation functions as an ant farm with the agar-agar serving both as potential habitat and nutrition for ants and other insects. The artist prepares and cooks the agar-agar on site and upon the successful completion of ‘Ant Farm Berlin’ – the installation will succumb to the process of decay.
