The Broccoli Chronicles, The Great Opening

Three weeks ago I but a bouquet of  broccoli in a plastic container filled up with glycerol, a chemical that supposedly preserves plants from decaying and today was the grand opening. I uncapped that bad boy and was at first stricken by a foul smell, but after removing the broccoli from the liquid and given it a quick rinse it smelled kind of (in lack of better words) fresh. There is a slight discolouring of the broccoli but otherwise it looks the same as when it went in to the glycerol bath. If my Broccoli stays the same I will mount it as a trophy and it will go up the wall.   

          

A Formless Work Orange

Digging around in the often very blatant racist material concerning colonialism I got stuck in the scientific racism. Particularly one picture caught my eye in its absurdness, unfortunately I couldn’t find any source from where it originated.

So I continue work with my fruit, oranges to be exact! This time looking at them the same way as the good old fashion raciologist would have done. Taking pictures of them from different angels, measuring them and keeping track of which country they where cultivated. I have noticed that most oranges available in Sweden tend to come from around the Mediterranean sea and they are quit hard to tell one and other apart. But I have confidence in a more scientific approach to the enigma that is Mediterranean oranges, maybe I even will find a superior orange, an überorange.  

Kollage av googlad apelsin

      

Den vite mannens börda

The next thing that caught my interest is the expression “white mans burden”, made famous by Rudyard Kipling in a poem of his. In essence it has come to mean that white christian people (women included depending on the agenda) has a duty to “civilize” non white, non christain people they happen to come across while colonising the world. It is a very interesting choice of worlds, because it makes European colonialism sounds like a chore, a burden that people rather would avoid. Well in my opinion this is a mind set that in some ways still is around today, for example, soldier that are sent to Afghanistan to teach democracy and a western way of running things. I am not certain how I will tie this to my collecting of trophies but I very much consider them both a cog in the same postcolonial wheel. The hunting is an extension of colonial thinking and just a form of exploitation!                          

Pears' Soap ad. 1900

Hemmingway land!

Ok it’s on.. I started my formless work in Hemmingway land, hunting just for the sport of it, rather then the necessity of survival. (Something the author Ernest Hemmingway was rather fond of, hence his land) The fact that these hunters pick out game depending on seize of its horn, colour of its fur, length of its feathers etc, with the intention to save and preserve this stuff and rather then eat it. 

Ernest Hemingway on safari in Tanganyika, 1934

I have a deep-rooted fascination for the way these hunting trophies are displayed and presented, the inevitable trophy room! 

Proud trophy room owner

 So I went hunting for some big game of my own, in my case vegetables and fruit, and rather then judge theme on freshness and quality as one usually does, I went for seize of stalks, colour of the peel and attributes that would look good on the wall rather then in a salad. Mounted my catch and made a trophy room of my own.