476 Promises

476 Promises follows marble and its representations across Europe. Observations, assumptions and inferences are gathered as qualitative situational case studies, from which recurring keywords are extracted and assigned a geographical location. At each site, a marble-imitation flag is planted and photographed.

Materials are discursive: their subjectivity, origin, position, authorship, reveals a less tangible form of power, the promise. A promise, as a solemn pledge of something to someone, is a hold-up situation between a hijacker and a hijacked, the latter caught in a momentum only the hijacker can grant or deny. It is a capitalisation on the hypothesis of a future to come. The traces left in the material are the subject of the work: an exploration of ideological and territorial sites through the precarity of their representation.

The keywords surface as Announcement Board (476 Promises), where the extracted terms are presented together, each carried on a DIN-A6 print in an edition of four hundred and seventy-six copies, set on self-adhesive grey marble-imitation foil.

Here gold gives way to marble, but the logic holds: a material loaded with prestige and power is distorted, imitated and repurposed to carry a different symbolic economy.

Exhibited in the group show Zukunftswucher, Stadtgalerie, Bern, 2017, alongside Black Flag.