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Superflex (Denmark, 1993) |
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The Danish collective Superflex, founded in 1993 by Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen, Jakob Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen, creates projects that encourage virtuous practices and global environmental and ethically sustainable awareness.Their approach has two aspects: it aims to provoke with strategies and actions that can be reintroduced in different situations by various subjects, and it strives to defend artistic practice as an operating tool outside the traditional museum-gallery-collector system. |
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In 1996/97 Superflex worked together with Danish and African engineers to create a simple and inexpensive portable biogas unit capable of generating sufficient energy for the lighting and cooking gas needs of an African family. Biogas, conceived for use in small-scale economies, is produced using organic materials, such as dung. The dung of two or three cows will produce four cubic metres of gas per day, which is sufficient to cook the meals and light the home of a family of eight to ten people. The use of this source of energy is not only totally eco-friendly and sustainable, but also avoids the use of alternatives such as wood burning, which is widely used in Africa with devastating consequences on the environment.
The project, devised in Tanzania and presented at Documenta X in Kassel in 1998 as a model of a certain approach to ecological artistic practices, continues to be used in many developing countries, such as the recent example of Zanzibar, illustrated here in a series of photographs.
The Biogas Unit seems to satisfy very simply and directly the basic principles of ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives), which invites researchers all over the world to design systems of industrial and energy production based on the principle of the elimination of waste and refuse. Taking a lesson from nature, in which the concept of "waste" is unknown, we can use any kind of waste to constitute a source of energy for the production of new materials or "green" energy.
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Biogas in Africa, 1998
biogas balloon
photo print, 146 x 216 cm
video DVD, 4’ 59’’
Courtesy the artists
Photo Credit: CCCS, Firenze; Valentina Muscedra |
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Biogas Unit – Tanzania, 1997
Application’s sample
Courtesy the artists
Photo credit: Superflex |
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Biogas Unit – Zanzibar, 2008
Application’s sample
Courtesy the artists
Photo credit: Superflex |
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