I / II / III
Braided copper from 8.6 kg / 8.00 kg / 7.1 kg each
Underground cable, 2026
The nests were crafted from the copper of underground cables with the type designation NYCWY. For this, I acquired the roughly one-meter-long, thick cable pieces from the scrap dealer and cut out the over 200 individual copper strands. For each nest, I used the entire copper from a single piece of underground cable.
Each nest is unique – not only in its structure, but also in its coloring. This occurs, for example, through short circuits that occurred in the underground cable: due to the heat generated, the copper turns darker, up to black.
Copper is a material of charged significance. Historically, the material is strongly linked to colonialism, which extends into our present day. Not least due to the boom in electric cars and their so-called “green energy”, copper is experiencing a new peak in terms of extraction. Yet the underground cables laid in Germany also consist largely of copper, which is often mined in Chile under questionable conditions. This copper thus enables the “Global North” to maintain its societal standard and simply connects everything here – from technology to electricity to everything that makes our modern society possible in the first place.
