techno|gene #80

2022

3D printing/Founded object

A Soviet fire extinguisher from the Gaza Cultural Center becomes a monument to the artist’s firefighter father—a man whose image survives only in fragmented digital traces: a webcam screenshot, random files. 3D-printed mushrooms with “corrupted file” effects visualize the patchwork nature of memory about a person whose life was dedicated to extinguishing fires, yet whose biography now itself requires rescue from oblivion.

My father. He served in Sevastopol in the fire brigade. It was a military fire department with all that entails. Then he returned to Nikolaev, where he married my mother, who had returned from St. Petersburg. Now I only have indirect information about my parents: none of the relatives are in contact.

And I don’t even have their photos, only a screenshot from a webcam from four years ago…