Material Interventions into Immaterial Landscapes
Intervention I: Contemporary Artefact (Natural Gas Flare)
Angela Anderson (2021) Postcards, Print, Website
This first of a series of site-specific interventions undertaken during my residency at Academy Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany, Contemporary Artefact (Natural Gas Flare) was intended as a cooperation with the Linden Museum, an ethnographic museum in Stuttgart. One of the artefacts held by the museum is the robe of the Mandan Chief Mato Tope, given to Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied, a german “explorer”, ethnologist and naturalist, in 1833, during his expedition on the Missouri River. Today, the Fort Berthold Reservation of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations finds itself in the heart of the Bakken shale oil formation, the second largest oil and natural gas producing region in the United States. The donated image of natural gas flare from the Bakken shale oil formation in North Dakota, to be displayed on the facade of the museum, was intended as an intervention into the pedagogical time-othering performed by ethnographic museums; a way of making explicit the legacies of and connections between the colonial collecting of artefacts and large-scale natural resource extraction. The project was unrealizable in its proposed form due to bureaucratic reasons on the part of the Linden Museum.
https://www.mutations.akademie-solitude.de/archive/contemporary-artefact-natural-gas-flare
Produced in the context of the Mutations Thematic Residency, Academy Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (DE)