As Sunshine Turns To Stone

As Sunshine Turns To Stone, installation view, 2024

As Sunshine Turns To Stone, scan view, 2024

As Sunshine Turns To Stone

Details & Material

About

2024
Anthracite and stone coal lumps
Burnt engraving of carboniferous coal forests
Stainless steel support stand
Headlamp
45cm x 45cm x 145cm

As Sunshine Turns to Stone (2024) positions anthracite rocks from North Rhine-Westphalia and the Svalbard archipelago under the glow of a coal miner's headlamp, elevated on a stainless steel support stand. Transforming the narrative of coal from a mere dirty, material substance of seemingly low intrinsic value into a metaphorical gemstone, akin to the significance of a diamond. The stone’s alluring quality draws the view closer to its glistening flat surface, revealing a primordial, petrified landscape from the Carboniferous period, some 300 million years ago, burned into its skin. This coal draws one under its spell, offering both a reverie of primordial origins and a shimmering, hopeful fantasy of progress yet to unfold, proposing a new age of exploration into the geological and metaphysical realities of primordial landscapes, which remain vital to contemporary energy production.

A connection that serves as a reminder of the living, forested origins of today's fossil reserves, based on plants' ability to capture and transform sunlight through photosynthesis and to fossilize light and current atmospheric conditions in the form of coal. Concurrently, it invokes thoughts of transience, as these ghosts of past worlds and atmospheres are released by the ever-burning fires of industrial progression. The ostensibly mundane coal fragments emerge as a metaphorical mise en abyme — a paradoxical emblem of aesthetic allure, primordial existence, and the obscured essence of industrial production. Geological treasures revealing themselves as the mother of modernity and the true catalyst of our contemporary, progress-driven epoch. The coal's radiating ecological impact underscores the dialectical relationship between beauty and destruction, life and its eventual entombment within the geological continuum.

3Khalil Berro Studio

khalilberrostudio@gmail.com
Zurich Bedretto Lenzburg
Switzerland

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