SAVE AS [MINE]: Group exhibition - Print a 3D thing - C-mine, Genk - August 2012

SAVE AS [MINE] is part of The Machine in collaboration with Design Platform Limburg and Materialise. Exhibition at C-mine, Genk, Belgium.

SAVE AS [MINE]

SAVE AS [MINE] is a project initiated by Maya Ben David, Roee Kremer and Jon Stam. It is a site-specific work for the Machine in C-Mine, but it stems a series of projects dealing with the mediation of memories through new technologies. Here we acknowledge that objects have always been used as tools to direct the narratives of our social recollection. Yet, when dealing with social memory questions of power and control are essential: who chooses what to remember and what to forget?

This project examines the current social technologies (P2P, Youtube and Facebook, ect.), as well as new production technologies (3d printing) that are enabling history to become more open and heterogeneous. Through these technologies we can not only transmit, but now also physically fix our own histories. SAVE AS [MINE] wishes to connect the story of the local mine to a wider cultural phenomenon by inviting designers to contemplate the void created by vanished industry in their own place. Each personal ‘figure of memory’ is made tactile, while its source inspiration, links, and associations, are embedded in a digital mosaic.

The first part of the installation was submitted by a group of international designers. The second part will focus on vanished/vanishing industries within the local region, which may focus on, but is not limited to, the coal mines of Genk. The output of the workshop will be a 15cm x 15cm 3d printed tile (with a maximum height of 15cm) which will tell a story of what has happened in the void of a specific industry. This may be a personal story of what has happened, a subjective comment on what is currently happening, or it can be a projection or wish for the future. The end result will be displayed on the historic tiled flooring, which creates an interesting link with the coal mine site and invokes multiple associations with other vanished but not forgotten industries.

Soulwatcher’s 3D printed artwork entry for the SAVE AS [MINE] Group exhibition

The subject for the artwork is the new building for CVO de Verdieping, an further education school situated on the mine site in Heusden-Zolder, Belgium. The school is build adjacent to and partly inside of a mine building.