Potemkin

POTEMKIN - park for post industrial meditation. Drawing Marco Casagrande.

A permanent park for post industrial meditation in Kuramata village, Japan. Commissioned by Echigo-Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial 2003. A cultivated junk yard as a mixture of a temple and machine. Big industrial park including in and outdoor spaces constructed out of 1 inch thick Kawasaki steel plates, 130 m long, 12 m wide, 5 m high. Other materials used: white gravel, Kama River bottom stones, crushed concrete, crushed glass, wood, volcanic saand, concrete, asphalt.



The park is situated castle like looking over the Kuramata rice fields and Kamagawa River. Potemkin is blessed and spirituously connected to one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan.



The working group was put together with operators from Alaska, Norway, England, Japan, Finland and France.

Casagrande & Rintala
Kuramata village, Nijgata province, Japan 2003
Echigo Tsumari Contemporary Art Triennial
Photos: Dean Carman

Redrum

Rerdum! Redrum! Drawing Marco Casagrande.

We were invited to Anchorage in February 2003 by Alaska Design Forum and decided to drive there by car. We shipped a Land Rover Defender from Helsinki to Halifax Nova Scotia in the Atlantic coast of Canada and drove it to Anchorage across the frozen North America. The Alaska Highway is surrounded by broken trucks, oil tanks and occasional moose. the closer to Alaska you get the more oil related junk there is in the nature.

Inspired by this and the Alaskan oil industry in general we decided to build a temple for oil in the middle of Anchorage. The material is recycled Alaska Railroad oil tanks cut to sections and set standing to frame away the city and open to sky. The floor is out of 7.000 pounds of oyster shells, the origin of oil. The brutal structure is painted bright red inside and has a fireplace in the end.

There was a vote in the local TV: "Is this a piece of fine art of a slap against the face of Alaska?" Fine arts lost. People were complaining that the temple smelled like oil.


Casagrande & Rintala 2003
Alaska Design Form
Anchorage Alaska
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