24 may 2022, Flor Linckens
Michel Lamoller: Anthropogenic Mass
If you express the human presence in terms of weight, you would be surprised at how small our impact actually is in relation to the total biomass on earth, the total weight of all living flora and fauna on earth. For example, humans make up only 2.3% of all animal biomass. Yet our footprint is so large that we call the era we live in the Anthropocene — the successor to the Holocene era — in which humans (the "anthropos") have a dominant and disastrous influence on life on Earth. In late 2020, new research from the Weizmann Institute of Science revealed that we have reached an official tipping point: the Anthropogenic mass, the sum of man-made objects — from offices to coffee mugs — is now estimated to weigh more than (the dry weight of) all living things on Earth. The estimated anthropogenic mass at that time was 1.1 trillion tons. To put that into perspective: in 1900, the artificial anthropogenic mass only made up 3 percent of the total biomass on earth. And the rate at which this mass is growing is staggering: every week, we produce as much new stuff (in weight) as the total (average) body weight of all 7.7 billion people combined. The human-made mass on Earth doubles every twenty years. A staggering statistic.
Michel Lamoller, Anthropogenic Mass 13 (Hangzhou), 2022, The Ravestijn Gallery
For Michel Lamoller, this bizarre sensation was the starting point for his latest series "Anthropogenic Mass". The German artist combines different disciplines in his practice, including photography, sculpture and installation. Photography is both his starting point and his main material, but he adds a layered and sculptural element.
Lamoller captured various metropolises for this series: from Hangzhou and Shanghai to Osaka. Cities where tens of millions of people live on a relatively small surface area. He then prints each photograph several times and superimposes them. The artist then uses a scalpel to cut away elements with meticulous precision, a process that sometimes takes weeks. That way, a relief is created, a three-dimensional representation of the image that literally takes up more space. Lamoller exposes elements and conceals other aspects, an effect that can only be felt when you are physically standing in front of the work. He tries to influence the ways in which we experience images and spaces, in a time in which we take in more and more visual information through a screen, in which our individual daily habitat has become smaller, due to lockdowns and working from home.
Michel Lamoller, Anthropogenic Mass 13 (Hangzhou), 2022, The Ravestijn Gallery
In previous series such as "Tautochronos", the artist added people to urban spaces. But in this series, the artist really emphasises the human product. Through his photographic sculptures, Lamoller asks questions about why we, as humanity, always want to keep on building, producing and, by extension, consuming. He hopes this will activate us to make different choices.
Lamoller did an internship at the prestigious Magnum Photos in New York and studied at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, where he was taught by Wim Wenders, among others.
