Work

Patient 0

The ecological crisis and related - but often not directly recognizable as such - problems have a significant impact on our lives. This is often not accepted as reality and the urgency of the situation is deliberately postponed to an undefined, future point in time. Instead of acknowledging a state of emergency, the standards of the normal are constantly being redefined, so that there is never a concrete need for action.
The cultural sector and all people working in it have a significant responsibility as bridge builders between science and human beings. An abstract and impersonal flood of information is embedded in a narrative that captures the viewers on a personal level and can result in a long-term change in behaviour. This opens up the possibility of bringing responsibility from the future ego into the present and inspiring concrete action.
The multidisciplinary artist Niclas Castello puts us in the role of committed viewers by disrupting inherent perceptions and perspectives. In Patient 0, Castello places tree trunks he has found, which have broken off due to natural circumstances or had to be felled, in hospital beds and wheelchairs. Infusion tubes and respirators represent life- sustaining measures. Canvases imprinted with messages serve as warming, protective blankets. Through trees, something (still) everyday, torn out of their natural habitats, Castello shows us a possible new normality and creates a visual outlook on an uncertain future. The artist places the wooden patients in showcases made of recycled plexiglass and creates a surreal scene for the viewer, where the endangered species of nature is to be kept alive with absurd rescue attempts. The sculptures resist the idea of an established order and, through a personalized visual language, call for active participation instead of passive mitigation. The result is an environment that calls our own existence into consciousness and confronts us with the fact that individuals can incept change. Castello does not want to moralize our anthropocentric society, which is seemingly inexorably on its way to the tipping point, but rather to open up a way for it to find sustainable knowledge itself.