TOM BOGAERT

TOM BOGAERT

  • WORKS
    • Wij Gwij Popinjay
    • Bonbon Tè Majik
    • Famasi Mobil Kongolè
    • Sun Ra Ra
    • This is Rwanda
    • Fountain
    • Ruining the City
    • Zoombies
    • Live from Berlin
    • Walking the Hellweg
    • Revolutions per Minute
    • Ant Farm Lagos
    • Observance
    • One two three, vive l'Algérie
    • Free Lens
    • Foam (I'm gonna live forever)
    • Bright Eyes
    • SecaCam Raptor
    • the one invented, twisted animator
    • 1971, Sun Ra in Egypt
    • pepsi, cola, water?
    • Prestige
    • Green Line
    • Voyage, voyage
    • Cracked Windshields
    • Pavement Popsicles
    • And Did Those Feet
    • Ant Farm Nablus
    • Sounds neat
    • Syria objects
    • Minecraft Mausoleum
    • Ariel
    • Watertanks
    • Greenhouse
    • Jordan Cucumber
    • KOMPRESSOR
    • Canary Space Ship
    • Empire state-building
    • Performance residue
    • Peacocks
    • Masque Qualité Export
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‘Ruining the City’ is a multi-coloured living sculpture built on top of the ‘Linzer Stadtmodell’, a large-scale bronze model of the Austrian city of Linz, ‘the Fuhrer’s home town’. The installation is made up of translucent ‘agar-agar’ – a vegetarian gelatine substitute that is combined with sugar, tea tree oil, weeds, soil, black ants, and Almdudler – the Red Bull of old.


The sculpture functions as an ant farm with the agar-agar serving both as habitat and nutrition for the ants. This allows the viewer to watch the ants turn the sculpture into a colony around which they organize their lifecycle. The ants were caught at the nearby Mauthausen Memorial – a former Nazi concentration camp. The agar-agar was cooked on site, and upon the successful completion of the project – the installation succumbed to the process of decay.


The project goes back to an ‘ArtSchool Palestine’ residency in Nablus centred around a groundbreaking essay by British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman : ‘Walking Through Walls: Soldiers as Architect.’ Ant Farm Nablus


‘Ruining the City’ focuses on not only the physical and visible urban reality that the city presents but also of a second, ‘archeofuturistic’ city as it exists in the memory and imagination of its current and former inhabitants.


With the support of afo architekturforum oberösterreich artist-in-residence program 2021 in Linz, Austria. Photos by Violetta Wakolbinger.