Apfeltraum – a reaction

Verwenden statt verschwenden

Because the GDR was a closed country with almost no imports, people were asked to treat food economically, which meant not throwing any food away, but using it instead. An ambitious aim and a very sustainable and progressive thought from the perspective of today's disposable consumer society.

An apple glut in the late 80s led even to the fact that companies were obliged to serve apples for dessert to employees, because there was no other way to ‘get rid of the apples’.
What could not be directly utilized was sold, bartered or preserved, mirroring the standard Stasi procedure of "counting, recording and archiving”.

These aspects were the inspiration for “Conservation” - a reaction or reinterpretation of the former phenomenon of sustainability. Apples and potatoes - symbolically used for fruit and vegetables - were decomposed to their component parts by using the machine called appledream (=Apfeltraum) and were dried and counted in homemade, counting frames.

All parts of the fruit have a function and therefore can (again) be recycled.

Collections of cores, slices and skins show the variety in their uniformity and remind of the composition of music or text. At the same time the consistent rhyme, structure and ordering symbolizes the garden itself … the place where everything started.