Hoel Duret: Low: Cat. Villa Merkel Esslingen

Hoel Duret’s artistic practice combines fictional stories with real events, forming a visual language based on science fiction, post-apocalyptic cinema, and modernist utopias; the relation ship between nature and technology is examined against the background of progressive digitalization. The installation in the entrance hall of Villa Merkel, for instance, presents a jungle quote embedded in a network of cables. As a result, the proliferating plant-technological organism seems to be engaged in an exchange of information–as though man could not but always control everything, including the growth of plants. Hoel Durets uses an algorithm based on climate data published online to control his artificial ecosystem. This data choreographs in real time the lighting, the vaporization, and the soundtrack of the instal lation. Scientifically measurable parameters of current climate change are thus inscribed into a spatial ensemble oscillat ing between romanticism and science fiction. This lends the installation a minatory, latently apocalyptic undertone while also reflecting our profound yearning for Arcadia.