Nina Canell and Robin Watkins’s newly produced video is the third module of Energy Budget (2017–2024), an ongoing work which focuses on the circulation of material agency and its energetics.
Installed on a curved car-ramp that leads underneath the Congress Center, the work considers the reliance on female ostrich feathers in the production of a dust-free car manufacturing environment. An unfinished car on a production line is referred to as a “car body” by the industry. Indeed, the word carcass, from Old French, means “trunk of a body, chest, dead body of an animal”—a fitting term considering the fact that most cars run on fuel wrested from bodies long gone.
Owing to the electrostatic properties of plumes and their ancient engineering, female ostriches have become essential suppliers of duster feathers. They are very efficient dust trappers: each barbule can attract and hold a single particle. By slowing down the conveyor track, the artists allow the car body to glide towards an uneasy embrace between soft filaments and hard steel. Dust, the composite exhaust of all materials, is the near invisible protagonist, grasped and held in place by the feathery presence of a flightless bird.
Nina Canell’s works foreground process and synergy, radically questioning material hierarchies and histories. Considering the transitory overlaps between minerals, animals, energies and technologies, her practice is committed to duration and circulation as fundamental sculptural tools. Nina Canell frequently collaborates with Robin Watkins on installations and artist’s books.