photograph courtesy The German PavilionENVIRONMENT # 4 – The Germany Pavilion. 080 Technical Paradise by Tom Matton. The desire to escape reality and return to a paradisiacal condition is as old as humankind itself. To at least temporarily satisfy this desire, architects around the world are increasingly creating artistic paradises, often in the most inhospitable places. The construction and maintenance of these paradises is attended by immense resource consumption and destruction of natural landscapes, both of which worsen the climate situation. This, in turn, leads to a need for ever-more technically manufactured paradises, which are, accordingly, erected; an inverted “perpetuum mobile” had been born. Already today, neither the Tree of Knowledge nor even a simple apple tree could grow without human assistance in those regions where the biblical paradise stood. Tom Matton visualizes this need for pro-vision and care in his installation of fifty apple trees and supply units, entitled, 080 Technical Paradise, implicitly posing the question of how things will go on: will the elite technical paradises that strengthen global disparities grow stronger and more pervasive, or will we realize that our only hopes for a new Eden is the creation of global equilibrium?
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