Elements of the Fish Bone chapel being 3D printed
If you're an artist or designer interested in applying your creative skills to life sciences, chances are that you've heard about Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Awards, an international ...
Elements of the Fish Bone chapel being 3D printed
If you're an artist or designer interested in applying your creative skills to life sciences, chances are that you've heard about Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Awards, an international competition that invites artists and designers to submit proposals to a jury of experts and develop them in close collaboration with The Netherlands most prestigious Life Sciences research institutes. The outcome of the competition range from the outrageously bold (the now famous bulletproof skin) to the ambitiously eco-friendly.
The winners of this year's edition of the competition are Charlotte Jarvis who recently talked to me about her Ergo Sum project, Howard Boland and Laura Cinti with The Living Mirror (more about this one soon, i hope) and Haseeb Ahmed who is planning to digitally fabricate a Fish Bone Chapel.
The artist is teaming up with the Netherlands Toxico-Genomics Center and Prof. Jos Kleinjans to build an architectural structure which, as its name suggests, will be made of fish bones. The vertebrae vaults, scaled walls and beating circulation systems of this architecture are derived from enlarged 3D prints and the skeletal structure of fish exposed to mutagenic toxins. Haseeb is working with the zebra fish, an animal often used for genetic testing as it is technically not considered to be animals for the first 5 days of their life
Ultimately however, the work also asks whether we can see past the dangerous connotations of mutation and regard it as a medium to generate new forms.
Zebra Fish altered exposed to toxins
Elements of the Fish Bone chapel being 3D printed
The more i read about the project, the more curious i grew so i contacted Hasseb Ahmed who patiently answered my many questions:
The Fish Bone Chapel draws a historical connection with the Capuchin Crypt located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome. The crypt is decorated with the skeletal remains of 4,000 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order, as a silent reminder of our own mortality.
Hi Haseeb! Your project, The Fish Bone Chapel, 'is a hybrid building, existing of fish bones.' I'm sorry but i'll have to start with the most mundane question because i imagine a chapel to be rather big and i suspect your final prototype might not rise to ambitious heights. So how tall, how big can the chapel be? And will it adopt a shape that people associate with the one of a chapel?
The Fish Bone Chapel is indeed the scale of a building. The goal has always been to create a spatial experience in which one can literally inhabit genomics research and in particular the mutations in Zebra Fish skeletons induced by exposure to toxins from embryo to adult.
My work will be sited in the atrium of the the current depot of the Naturalis Museum and former Royal Museum for Natural History built in the early 1900's. This atrium already has a kind of pseudo-Dutch Protestant religious architecture complete with niches, vaulted ceilings, and chandeliers. However, instead of religious iconography it features iguanas, snails, and fish. My aim is to create works that build onto this architecture with arches of my own, ornaments, and chandeliers so that the space appears as though it was made to host the Fish Bone Chapel all along. My reference is the Capucine Bone Chapels of Southern Italy which use the bones of former Monks to construct architectural features. In my case it's Fish not Brothers. That was one concept of Life and Death given by Catholocism and I want to address the new intermediate stages of life and death brought about by Genomics research and its legal apparatus.
Interesting enough the central 'altar piece' is at the base of a stairwell often drawn by M.C. Escher in his labyrinthine works and I will play up on this as well.
The description of the project also mentions beating circulation systems which makes me think that the work will have some kind of life
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