globster_A

Ephimera, the artificial garden you should build if you want to grow moulds.

Ephimera,  the incubator garden of moulds, has been built from the group Globster_A  in the ‘gunpowder room’, in Forte Prenestino, one of the forts of Rome built in late 1800’s.      In 1980 it was used as occupation space for music concerts.

After nearly twenty years of abbandonment, the gunpowder room resurfaced thanks  to the initiative of  Babel2, a festival of critical housing:  thus a signal towards new spaces used in a vital way. This installation lives, like the room  from an apparent abbandonment of a  lemon  to  a found garden.

plan of the installation:

The ephimera garden builds itself with abbandoned materials that are ready for new recycling, like plastic bottles.  One thousand different bottles have been used.   Most of them derived from the normal activity of the Forte Prenestino, like the party of the First of  May, the party of non-workers.

Manual of construction of the basic element:

The artificial garden is composed of ’ basic cells’  obtained though the remodeling of the components of the bottle:

- get bottle A with an halph hourglass form, cut it after the concave section like picture below.

- get bottle B, best if the same as A, and cut it slightly shorter than A.

- put them toghether, inserting the longest (A)  in the shorter one to obtain a united basic  hourglass formed cell. This will be the mould ’ incubator ‘;  once inserted the food in  the incubator (we advice lemon peelings no yeast for they are dangerous for immune-depressed people) the condensation will quickly develop, accelerating the process of wasting of the organic materials and eventually the autodegenaration of mould worlds.

- the non used half bottles should be cut in horizontal and vertical to obtain ‘sheets’ of plastic, that rolled will used to connect the united cells between each other (d).

- now we can build plastic plants obtained by the connection of two or more incubator  cells:

the stem obtained reassambles  the hyphae of moulds (their sexual  organs)  the ‘roots’ are connected to the ground with a whole bottle full of water;  other then giving stability to the structure, it will give the right level of humidity necessary to grow  the mould garden once the cell is filled with organic material.  Every plastic cell is closed in itself , but  at the same time it is prepared to aggregate infinity with the other similar cells.

- Once our lemons are moulded, there forms will reveal to us the potential forms of post-   distruction materials, that in ‘ephimera’ are exposed in semispherical  casckets containers near the artificial garden: