International invited Art in Public Places competition, 2016 (proposal)
UN-Campus, Bonn

Steel, glass, LEDs

The existing winding staircase is copied, mirrored and distorted. The intricate steel structure winds with ever increasing radii up to the ceiling. The form it creates recalls a vortex.

At the centre of the front wall, there is a disc of light that transmits a sentence fragment in Morse-code light signals exactly every hour between 20:00 in the evening and 07:00 in the morning:
"...the occurrence or non-occurrence of uncertain circumstances that are beyond the control..."
Each time it takes about 7 minutes, after which the glaring white light, which can be seen from afar, disappears until the next full hour.

The design addresses the theme of climate change and one of the focuses of the UN in Bonn: exceptional meteorological events such as extreme storms and droughts are becoming more frequent. The additional energy we are constantly pumping into the atmosphere undermines the system’s stability.

The peculiarly vague, apparently contradictory Morse code sentence comes from the field of financial products and insurance. Formulations of this kind can be found in contracts to largely exclude the liability of companies in the event of "force majeur".

In this artistic design, its significance transforms to infer that it is hardly possible to estimate the effects of continued global warming and that there is no "liability exclusion" for its consequences. They affect all humans – albeit to a contrasting degree depending on where they live and what they earn.