Bread + Steel = Moving Mountains
LAB LA BLA bake mountains out of waste. Moving Mountains is formed with by-products from Sweden’s three largest resource industries – forestry, agriculture and mining.
Time, heat and pressure, bread and mountains share a recipe. By exploring recipes together, perhaps we will understand both in new ways. Rolling and baking your own personal mountain is an exercise in domestication and re-mystification of the landscape. The process is as malleable as the material.
When bedrock is excavated for iron, great clouds of slag dust remain. The dust serves no industrial purpose, being only the byproduct of extraction, the memento of a mountain. This iron dust is ready to seed new mountains. Its granularity allows it to be kneaded into foams, doughs and clays. Mountainous membranes can drape, hang, lean, or project. Mountainous foams can be a blend of mist and rock. New mountains can be baked rigid, or coaxed into leathery softness that drapes across bodies and landscapes. This material continuum allows function and space to adopt fluidity. Existing spaces can be redefined through the introduction of fuzzy boundaries.
Lab La Bla proposes the moving of the Mountain instead of the city of Kiruna. This work is a method of wayfinding through the landscape, of understanding the connection between the materials of the land and the people who take, use and consume them. Through land we map the history and future of wanted and unwanted products of Swedish mining, forestry and agricultural industries. We transform what's dead into living and food in to Mountain as visitors learn how to bake bread from stone with a simple equation: waste (regional) + wheat (global) = love
We will bring people to the Mountain with objects, machines, food, sound, artefacts and a cave-rave. The exhibition concept is simple; If you cannot come to the Mountain, the Mountain will come to you.
