DER OZEAN AUF DEM TISCH 2022
1-channel HD video, color, sound, 7:35 min.
Video on TV screen 42 inches
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In 1854, the article 'The Ocean on the Table' by an anonymous author appeared in the then very popular family magazine 'Die Gartenlaube'. The article described glass vessels filled with water in which fish lived, called aquariums; a term coined by the English naturalist Philip Henry Gosse in a publication from 1853. Der Ozean auf dem Tisch explores the fascination of 19th-century bourgeois culture with domesticated nature. The video installation juxtaposes aquarium imagery with digitally animated figures, collapsing distinctions between the organic and artificial.
In this poetic yet unsettling narrative, the artist traces how the modern desire to possess and display nature foreshadowed the ecological alienation of the Anthropocene. Fish glide beside digital bodies in an uncanny choreography of coexistence and control. The work becomes an allegory of humanity’s hubristic attempt to simulate life, an aquarium for a dying planet.
Credits: © Patricia Jacomella