ARTWORK: Privilege of Fake Abundance.  2021

MEDIUM: Sculpture

MATERIALS: Wook, epoxy, water, electronics, eclectic tableware and objet troubées.

SERIE: Unique piece. N.01 - N.04

 

Water flowing in an endless stream of abundance, painting a lands- cape of moving reflections on bright plates. Its colors and patterns create relationships with each other, blurring into a fluid synthesis of new colors and formations – like silk slipping between your fingers. Each plate tells a story of its own, about a person that cherished it or would eat their favourite foods from its surface. Together, the kitchenware tells a different story, thrown into a sink without consideration, waiting to be washed, or placed carefully and intentionally as a sculptural art piece.

Rippling, bubbling, trickling, babbling and dribbling, are just a few words to describe the flow of water. Standing in-between the sculptures, a certain serenity falls over you — the meditative sound of water, like being in a zen-garden creates a severe contrast with Ni- cole Vindel’s critical viewpoints with this piece. ‘Privilege of Fake Abundance’, a work that tricks us by its beauty, but tells us devious- ly through its seductiveness that every decision has consequences.

Taking the symbol of water — representing fertility, birth, life, and rejuvenation. Our life source, ancient and universal, signifies the chaos from which the world has been created, and will continue to shape life. Vindel makes us conscious that this sign of abundance, might be a ‘fake’ abundance, an artificial, invisible, unfathomable entity. Which confronts us with the question — how endless is our stream of abundance, really?

Water, we can’t live without it, we only have to open our tap to experience this ‘infinite’ stream of abundance. All forms of life need water, but not everyone’s needs can be met. We take our wealth for gran- ted — believing that nature is for exploitation, without reciprocity, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Vindel’s work highlights the imbalances in our world, how the privilege of one is the absence of another. Although, what we seem to forget is that “the natural state of man is poverty and that wealth is artificial’’ (Manuel Ayau, 2004). Values like convenience and accessibility, have simplified our lives, but have also estranged us from our natural environments. ‘Privilege of Fake Abundance’ challenges our relationship to seemingly endless resources and questions our daily consumer habits.

 

The exhibition was on view February 2022 at Imagin Café, Barcelona.

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Words by Lara Bongard

Photography: Lara Bongard and Cara Schanuel