Magma 2013

Cast in aluminum and plated with palladium leaf, since 2013 the artwork conforms to the shape of its bed in three rain gutters at the Brunnmatt Schoolhouse. In addition, the artist has staged a light shaft in the entrance hall as a catch basin for the magma flows. Here can be touched what only could be perceived on the façade from a distance. In all parts of the work, the cooled stream of aluminum – and thereby also of the production process – has remained visible. In this way Saskia Edens responds to the architecture of the Schoolhouse, an example of so-called Brutalism: the sculptural béton brut or exposed concrete architecture is characterized by such rough tactile effects achieved through the imprint of the wooden formwork.

Saskia Edens (b. 1975 in Geneva) grew up in Lausanne and has lived and worked in Basel since 2002. She received the Sponsorship Award of the Alexander Clavel Foundation in 2007. A focus of the artist is performance art through which she participates in events worldwide. She explores such themes as prehistoric art, cycles of nature, phenomena of light, and formative processes of our planet. In 2013 she executed Magma, a Kunst-und-Bau [Art and Architecture] project on the façade of the Brunnmatt Schoolhouse.