by Katherine Monk,August 7, 2010, Postmedia News

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It’s really the last place you’d look for art: Behind barbed wire, on the back corner of an abandoned industrial lot, tucked in behind a big pile of dirt and gravel sprouting scrappy clumps of grass.

In the movies, this would be the place to dump a body. In Vancouver, this generic strip of halfpaved wasteland next to the Olympic Village has become a piece of interactive public art. The transformation is coming at the request of Vancouver curator Barbara Cole and at the hands of Folke Koebberling and Martin Kaltwasser, two Berlin-based artists who’ve gained international attention through their conceptual approach to public spaces. From reconfiguring the former viewing platforms that once looked over the Berlin Wall into “negative steps” that lead downward on the same ground, to transforming cars into working bicycles, Koebberling and Kaltwasser are now turning the discards from the Athletes Village into a full-scale bulldozer that will eventually decompose. They are using Microstrand, a material made from compressed wheat chaff, a greener alternative to fibre-board or MDF that uses no formaldehyde binder. Hundreds of boards were used to protect the interior spaces of the Village — now market condos for sale by the city — and over the next few weeks, they will be shaping what was once wheat, then garbage, into faux heavy machinery. At the moment, it’s the forward track and wheel that gives the structure meaning, prompting even more passersby on the South side of the False Creek seawall to stare through the shiny chain-link fence and ask: “What are you making?”

“We hear it all day long. Sometimes, you feel like an animal in a cage but I think this also adds to the work,” Koebberling says. Koebberling says the whole point of the work she and her art/life-parenting partner Martin make is to prompt questions about the way we live by recreating the spaces around us. “It’s also about communication. You have to show [and tell] people you can use a car park for something other than cars, for instance,” says Koebberling, who, with Kaltwasser, has created portable living spaces in parking lots and public squares throughout Europe. The central key to these creations is the material: It’s all reclaimed and recycled. “We want to show how these materials still have value,” Koebberling says. Material reclamation is a concept that’s finding plenty of fans and followers in art circles in London, Berlin, Paris and Barcelona, where the movement has spawned everything from “trashion accessories” and “trashion shows” to a celebration of Mash Ups — movies, videos and film work that use found footage and soundbytes to create new work — at the coming European Media Art Festival in Osnabrueck.

Cole, an established curator and leading expert in the field of public art, says she monitored the Koebberling and Kaltwasser website before including the team in When the Hosts Come Home, a series dedicated to exploring the space surrounding the former Olympic Village and its transformation from venue to neighbourhood. It’s all part of the Other Sights For Artists project, an organization that works to match cutting-edge artists with original public spaces. Cole says she had seen some images of what Koebberling, a former Emily Carr student, was working on in Europe with Kaltwasser. She liked the esthetic and she liked the thought process, so she cyberwatched them for two years. “We (the board at Other Sights) were really interested in creating temporary platforms around the city, and were interested in artists who were working with architecture in public spaces,” says Cole, who invested countless hours filling out the requisite grant applications for funding. In the end, she found support from the Canada Council for the Arts, BC Arts Council, The Vancouver Foundation and The City of Vancouver, as well as Emily Carr University of Art and Design and Langara College, and UBC’s school of architecture, which supplied support crew. “The clincher was the Olympics were coming, and the body of work [from Koebberling and Kaltwasser] used remnant materials. “We figured there would be a lot of material, and started to talk about a curatorial presence that would reflect on the Olympics, before, during and after the Games.”

Koebberling says the compostable bulldozer is in itself a meditation on time, not only because it will biodegrade over the course of an estimated eight years, but because bulldozers are a symbol of massive and near-immediate landscape transformations. “We had the idea to create a machine that normally destroys,” she says. “If you look at the way a bulldozer is used in war, such as on the border of Palestine and Israel, it just takes things away so fast. But it also can create, because it is used in construction. “The idea is always that you can make your own city. You can recreate the spaces, and this is a point Vancouver should be proud of, because not very many other places in the world would accept art that will decompose. For a time, this will look ugly.” If all goes according to plan, the wheatboard bulldozer will be complete by September, at which point the public will be invited to plant seeds in its plant boxes (disguised as bulldozer parts). After that, nature will take over and shape, and reshape, the entire sculpture through natural processes. They are hoping to install a web camera to document the entire transformation with time-lapse recording, but the main focus at the moment is finishing the monolithic “wooden toy,” which has its set of challenges, not the least of which is the amount of material they were hoping to use. Originally, 5,000 boards were offered. They will make do with just under 1,000. Kaltwasser is confident he can make it work, because he can keep things simple. “Engineers think about how to make something,” he says. “We use a Lego model and take our design from that. Using a tape measure, we can make it larger, and then we add up the cross-sections,” he says. Despite the “simplicity” of the design, the bulldozer is guaranteed to elicit myriad emotional responses from the general public. “Because it is made from one material, it will look neat and nice, Kaltwasser said. “It will look like a giant wooden toy, which reminds us of our childhood. Children always see the world as gigantic, so really, it has this beauty, but it’s also a meditation on childhood.”

© Copyright © The Vancouver Sun

Northwest corner of the Olympic Village

Southeast False Creek, Vancouver, Canada

September 2010 – of undetermined duration

As South East False Creek began its new life as Canada’s largest ‘green’ housing development, the Berlin-based artist team of Folke Köbberling  and Martin Kaltwasser used materials recycled from the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Athletes’ Village to create a situation of exchange and cooperation. On lands slated for future development, the artists created a 6 x 7 x 14m artwork that invited the participation of new neighbours to liberate the discarded, share excess, and contribute to the building of new forms and meanings.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is this?

In the Summer of 2010, Köbberling & Kaltwasser worked with a project crew, team of Emily Carr University of Art and Design students and other volunteers to create a sculpture from over 1,000 wheat board panels recycled from the neighbouring 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Athletes’ Village. The sculpture took the form of a larger-than-life bulldozer — with shovel down, it faced the expanse of  land awaiting future development on this  South East False Creek site.

What is it made out of?

The sculpture is made from wheat board – an engineered composite panel of 94% finely ground wheat chaff and 6% MDI, methyl diphenyl disocyanate which is a formaldehyde free binding agent. The material is compostable. During construction, soil was added to some of the sculpture’s cavities to aid in the decomposing process.

How long did it take to make?

9 weeks. Construction was completed on September 10, 2010.

How long will it occupy the site?

The artwork has an undetermined end date. Exposed to weather, soil, and the passing of time, the wheat board construction is giving way to a process of gradual decomposition, its form providing fodder for new growth. Transitioning slowly from sculpture to plant nursery, the project’s bounty will be offered for transplanting throughout the future development. The City will be making decisions about the future of the old City works yard lands in coming years. In the meantime, the generative efforts of The Games are Open will be subject to economic, biological and social forces.

What will happen to it as it starts to break down?

Over time, the wind, rain and sun in combination with local plants, animals and fungi, will weaken the boards to the point of collapse. As they come apart and fall, more soil is being added to encourage further growth and transformation. Native plants are gradually self-seeding and through the efforts of the neighbouring “Grow” public art project (summer 2011), cultivated plants were also introduced.

About the Artists

Köbberling & Kaltwasser create situations that encourage the participation of diverse publics. Their work uses informal methods to make visible the transformation of begged, borrowed, donated, salvaged, and found materials into publicly used objects and spaces. They have exhibited extensively in Germany and internationally and were included in the 2009 Architecture Biennial in Sao Paulo and in the 2010 Poznan Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include Power Plant / Chinati Foundation, Marfa; Galerie Anselm Dreher, Berlin; Ujadowski Castle CSW, Warsaw/PL; Architekturgalerie am Weißenhof, Stuttgart; Artforum Berlin; Lothringer 13/Laden, Munich; Simultanhalle, Cologne; and Shedhalle, Zurich. Recent works for public space include The Jellyfish Theatre in London’s city centre, Cars into Bicycles at Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, California and Trash Circulated, at the Werkleitz Festival.

Curator and Project Management

Barbara Cole

Project Intern

Karen Garrett de Luna

Project Leaders, Work Crew

Emma Artis, Miguel Da Conceicao, Gabe Daly, Jinhan Ko, Chelsea Trousdell, Desmond Wong

Volunteers, Work Crew

Neudis Abreu, John Armitage, Emma Artis, Matthew Ballantyne, Stewart Burgess, Neil Chung, Gabe Daly, Louis Douesnard, Sherry Gilbank, James Kemp, Christian Kliegel, Chad Manley, Dave Mason, Emilio Rojas, Michael Schwartz, Mike Taylor, Sandy Wang, Steve Williams, Antoni Wojtyra, Desmond Wong, Michael Zife

Emily Carr University of Art + Design Co-op Students, Work Crew

Lance Cardinal, Tony Charlie, Tom Hsu, Sanghyun Samuel Kim, Bahador Saray Sorour, Sarah Storteboom, Chelsea Trousdell, Shuai Zhao

Headquarters Artist

Holly Schmidt

Commissioned Text (website)

Holly Ward — Read Essay

Photo Documentation (ongoing)

Barbara Cole, Tom Hsu

Funders

British Columbia Arts Council
City of Vancouver
The Canada Council for the Arts
Vancouver Foundation

Partners

Langara College Centre for Art in Public Spaces

Partners in Education

Emily Carr University of Art + Design

Donors and Other Kind Souls

City of Vancouver
Eric Deis Studio
Exchange-A-Blade
Home Depot
Millennium Development Group
PWL Partnership Landscape Architects Inc
Roberts & Stahl Barristers and Solicitors
Second City Printing
The Model Shop
Bob
Germaine and Ian
James and Daniel
Katharine
Landon
Sheila Mackenzie

Above and Beyond

City and Park Board Staff: Bob Chang, Charlie Cuzzetto, Tilo Driesen, Wally Konowalchuk , Manabu Koshimura, Allen Lee, Scott Hein, Bryan Newson, Alix Sales, Joe Snadel, jil p. weaving
Langara College: Centre for Art in Public Spaces Steering Committee, Katie Eliot, Eric Stewart and Sylvia Tan

Related Links

False Creek [T & T]