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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Uta Kogelsberger
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The five channel video installation Cull, part of the bigger project Fire-Complex, was Kögelsberger’s response to the 2020 SQF fire complex that destroyed 174 acres of Sequoia National Forest, 14% of the world’s Giant Sequoia population, as well as half the community of Sequoia Crest including Kögelsberger’s USA home. Fire Complex was a project that started from the personal to reflect on a global emergency. It brought together photography, video and performance in the public realm to raise awareness and momentum the regeneration of our forests. Driven by research it unpacked the complex social and political entanglements surrounding wildfire prevention and forest management in California. It included a collaborative community-based replanting effort in developed with the support of Forest Services, Cal Fire and the Archangel Ancient Tree Archive that put over 6000 trees into the ground. This replanting effort was visited by six bi-partisan members of Congress who subsequently signed the Save our Sequoias Act. This in turn gave Frost Services the leverage to implement emergency measure for wildfire prevention in Giant Sequoia groves. The video work Cull, exhibited here, was shot in the community of Sequoia Crest. It highlights the scale of the gigantic task of the clear up process after the wildfires. It follows the work of the strike teams over a one-year period as they are cutting down the trees left standing that are now endangering what remains of the communities and infrastructure. In an orchestrated choreography each tree is documented as it comes crashing to the ground, like a dead carcass, sometimes with such force that the ground shakes. Sounds punctuate the motion of collapsing trees which squeal under their own weight. The occasional sound of an axe acts like a metronome triggering the drop of a tree, pacing the work into a score. Mostly the loggers cutting the trees are not visible in the frame. Every so often they appear, ant sized, dwarfed by the scale of the disaster we have created.
Artist(s): Kögelsberger U
Publication type: Exhibition
Publication status: Published
Year: 2022
Venue: Royal Academy of the Arts
Location: London
Media of Output: 5 Channel Video Installation
URL: https://vimeo.com/726038086
Notes: Winner of the 2022 Royal Academy Wollaston Award. See Press release: https://royal-academy-production-asset.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/b5fcaabc-e7d1-432c-8414-1f3012d1183a/Royal%20Academy%20Wollaston%20Award%20Winner%202022%2021_06.pdf
