Kaja Clara Joo ︎
The Age of Substitution (Grapefruit)
Edition: ︎
2025: Calcium Powder, Natural Rubber, Silk Strings, Stainless Steel, Brass Joints, Videoloops
The Age of Substitution (Grapefruit) eels like a gentle fever dream in the form of a corporeal broadcasting station: Opening with South Korea’s current strategic political rush to secure rare minerals an echo of older memories interweave within these video essays: the 1997 gold-collection campaign, when families melted private heirlooms to help repay the nation's debt. Today, those precious elements live not only in devices but inside us: an average humans body contains all the elements to cast a cathode of a semiconductor, a circuit board, or a metal brick the size of a grapefruit.
As the viewer hastes between different timelines a question arises: Just as dinosaurs became petrol to light our lamps and fuel cars.. will our own mortal
remains one day ignite other people’s devices?
