Stefanie Herr / The Growth Imperative
I’ve learned more about politics in the past year than the previous 35 combined, and part of that has been about the economy which has impacted me in a very real way. Stefanie Herr’s The Growth Imperative uses six photographic relief sculptures to explore stock charts over a period of six years. Each piece is crafted by hand using pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag, museum matboard, aluminium, and other materials.
“The Growth Imperative explores the spatial dimension of stock charts by translating their peaks and valleys into physical coordinates. Inspired by the neoliberal fantasy of infinite economic growth on a finite planet, The Growth Imperative maps the performance of the S&P 500 Pure Growth Index over a six-years period between 2009 and 2015 and transposes it into six sculptural objects covered with photographs of forests.
The forest is the place where growth is inevitable and vegetation luxuriates. It is a multidimensional space that expands both horizontally and vertically and devours everything within its boundaries. Exposed to the erratic and uncontrollable behaviour of the stock market, each photograph is stretched, distorted and finally broken into 440 triangular facets. Thus, The Growth Imperative seeks to unmask the self-destructive nature of neoliberal capitalism and its central role in causing serious environmental, social and territorial imbalances.
Entirely crafted by hand, each piece of the series took about two months to complete. In a world subject to the vagaries of global capitalist economy, the market constitutes the main creative force behind it and consequently becomes its true sculptor.”
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