Artists

Fadri Cadonau

Press release

There was a box. The exhibition title sounds like the start of a genesis saga. Suddenly, there is an inside, an outside, a small piece of world. Perhaps this strange enchantment that exudes from containers such as boxes, chests, or drawers already inheres in this moment: they conceal, preserve, and transform at the same time. In his Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard described the intimacy of such small spaces: their ability to conceal memories and visions, and in their limitedness allow worlds of their own to emerge. For him, the box is not just a container, but a place in which world accumulates. In Fadri Cadonau’s works as well, again and again such strange sites seem to emerge. His artistic practice combines research and material, historical contexts and geological time-spaces. Material here becomes a form of memory. A piece of wood, salt, or coal bears not only its physical make up, but refers to the time that created it, to the paths that it has taken, and to human orders that link up to that. The intricate Wardian case (Es ward ein Kasten, 2026), a box developed to transport ferns, provided an artificial climate in miniature for long ship journeys, allowing plants to travel across long distances. It thus not only miniaturizes nature, but replicates the entire world. At the same time, the fern takes us far beyond this particular box: it recalls the prehistorical forests, whose plant material turned into coal over millions of years. In Cadonau’s chest carved from a single tree trunk (Dem Köhler glauben, 2026), the live plant, its geological past, and its current release all come together. The teak of the ship skeleton (Im selben Boot, 2026) also continues to explore question of the material as memory. Wood is grown time, but by way of its processing is removed from a living context and transferred to human use. The teak from Myanmar carries a story of trade, political violence, and ecological exploitation that continues when it is utilized for the luxury world of super yachts. The name of multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos’ yacht, Koru, of all things, leads back to the fern: in Māori culture, koru refers to the shape of an uncoiled fern frond and stands for growth and renewal. In the world of the super yacht, this image takes on a strange turn and refers at the same time to the inequitable distribution of resources and possibilities. At the same time, the old promise of Noah’s Ark resonates in the super yacht: a protected inner space that only carries the few through the flood to safety. The limitation of the space becomes the condition of rescue, and thus symbolizes that protection and security are not equally available to all. Perhaps the miniature is therefore never just a smaller replica of reality. Something is distilled in it. Linkages that stretch across large spaces and extended periods of time find a preliminary form in an object. This is also true for the salt used to make the small scapegoats (Salz in der Wunde, 2026), in which material and social stories overlap. For centuries, salt was a trading good and a means of payment, the bearer of value and power. In the scapegoat, a social order is revealed in which guilt can be transferred to a single individual body. Yet this body does not endure. It is slowly removed by licking and disappears in the very process in which it fulfills its function. This exhibition reveals not so much a preservation in the sense of standing still, but rather a peculiar form of transferal. Fadri Cadonau removes things from their contexts, shrinks them, distils them, and transfers them to new constellations. Precisely in this fashion, traces of what preceded remain. The box becomes a place where time condenses. Perhaps boxes are so seductive for that very reason: they promise that the world can be preserved by limiting it. But what we include doesn’t necessary disappear. It waits. Marlene Marti Bürgi Trans. Brian Currid