Post-Fordite 6, 2020
fossilized automotive paint, epoxy resin, powdered stone, steel
Courtesy the artist
Collection Hartwig Art Foundation. Promised gift to the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Ergdoed / Rijkscollectie
Presentation at the 24th Biennale of Sydney was made possible with assistance from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Post-Fordite 7, 2022
fossilized automotive paint, epoxy resin, powdered stone, steel
Courtesy of the artist

For some time, it may have felt to those who invested in America’s vehicle manufacturing boom that they had stumbled upon a gold mine. Throughout the early 20th century, entire cities survived off the wealth that flowed in and out of the automotive industry.

For Detroit in the United States, it was its lifeblood. It was there that Henry Ford’s car-production lines were conceived; each new vehicle trundling down the line, given wheels, roofs, engines, and a spray of hardy paint. A spray that often missed, leaving layers of bright paint congealed in the manufacturing bay that would be baked along with cars as they cured. A baking which could occur over 100 times, creating solid, rainbow rocks.

Known as Fordite or Detroit agate, these quasi-geological forms were cast aside until the decline of the automotive industry saw former, now unemployed, factory workers and  scavengers descend upon the abandoned factories. Soon, Fordite was picked over, cut, and polished as if it were an actual gemstone, then circulated online where it began to accrue value. Agnieszka Kurant combines multiple pieces of Fordite from many defunct factories around the globe with epoxy resin, to make it appear like both a geological and archaeological discovery. For Kurant, the fossilised paint is an embodiment of more than a century of amalgamated human labour.

The work offers a speculation on how value is translated and transgressed, through data capitalism wherein the entire humanity is exploited as a factory of both digital and carbon footprints. Post-Fordite 6 and Post-Fordite 7 are windows into what will be left behind when the last remaining great industries collapse, and the gold mines revealed to be nothing more than holes in the earth.

Agnieszka Kurant is a conceptual artist whose work investigates collective and nonhuman intelligences, the future of labour and creativity, and the exploitations within surveillance capitalism. Kurant proposes a rethinking of the human and more-than-human worlds from a perspective of plural subjectivity, as a polyphony of agencies. Collaborating with scientists, Kurant establishes networks based on crowdsourcing and made of multiple agents, to produce unstable, hybrid, evolving forms. Oscillating between biological, digital and geological, natural and artificial, life and nonlife, her speculative works explore emergence, cybernetics, automation, artificial life, mining industries, re-distribution and the replacement of individual authorship by complex, collective forms.

Read more about the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Ten Thousand Suns, by purchasing the catalogue here.