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ABOUT DIE BERLINER ZUKEBÄRIN (2002 - 2003)
Die Berliner Zuckerbärin, 2002–2003, employs a metropolitan metaphor as a generative principle, concentrating on the Berlin’s role in the history of research into genetic functioning and manipulation as a trope for cultural and historical process.
A large female bear, a symbol of Berlin since 1280, stands on a Corinthian column, modeled on those at the Reichstag. This column, wound with copper tubing around its base, serves as an elaborate antenna, one attuned to receive a particular frequency, that of a radio station specializing in tango music. The bear is excited by a single song Das ist die Berliner Luft! (It’s Because of the Berlin Air!) On hearing this popular song the bear is milked by an automated goat milking machine attached to her two teats,and the milk pumped into an adjacent milk churn.
A radio sited at the base of the column scans the airwaves for all tangos—except Das ist die Berliner Luft!—these varied tunes are not the catalyst for the bear’s lactation but instead excite a second pump mechanism in the milk churn transferring the milk to the first of two glass tanks: the primary and secondary Prismatic Chambers.
It is in these two tanks that the sugars present in the bear’s milk are sequestered into their four individual constituent sugars: lactose, sucrose, fructose, and glucose. These four sugars are then individually bonded onto three glass filament threads that are meticulously twisted to form a single sugar strand.
The Braiding Machine in the far distance draws this strand down the allée of twenty-four sugar cones through a glass conduit. Each cone along this processional route sports a sash bearing the name of an Instigator, a Berlin personality—cultural, historical or scientific—who has given their name to a particular plant.
Four tapestries surround the braider, each is embroidered with texts and symbols representing a different aspect of Berlin’s history: a Durchsteckschüssel, a type of double-headed key found only in Berlin; a synopsis of Fritz Lang’s expressionist film Dr Mabuse, 1922; a Linden leaf, and its attendant mythology; finally a map of Berlin indicating the original gates to the inner city. During the course of the exhibition the embroideries are gradually unpicked, but the texts and images remain readable from the pattern of their stitch holes.
The four cultural bases (the unraveled threads from the embroideries) are directed by pulleys into the Double Helix Encoder, a densely geared mechanism which, by a system of counter-rotating drums, encases the strand from the secondary Prismatic Chamber in a double helix jacket. These four individual threads are analogous to adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine, the four constituent elements forming DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid); the order of their combination determines the expression of any given gene.
The fiber, from a single thread, becomes a three-core strand in the Prismatic Chambers, then a cored plait after jacketing by the Double Helix Encoder, and finally a complex double-jacketed interwoven braid. The same threads are always present in the braid but their precise combination is in constant flux; the Berlin Braid is an ever-changing sequence, endlessly reconfigured.
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