............. M U U N G A N O .............

Sweetshop

Client: Self promotion
Media: Material experiment
Project start: Oct. 2006
Status: On-going, skulls shown at gallery Monde Radieux in Stockholm and sold at Sheet Millard Gallery in Los Angeles.
Link: www.artleak.org/civicmatters/proposal_muungano.html

This experiment started in the fall of 2005 when we were invited to participate in the collaborative project Civic Matters. Other people involved in project were designers, artists, thinkers and curators from Finland, Sweden and US. The project started with a long dialogue via the web between all participants and culminated in two-week long workshop at the gallery LACE in Los Angeles.
We wanted to do something that could be mass-produced at a low price and give it a unique form. After some time we found out that sugar would work as interesting material. Melted it almost looks like glass and of course it has a symbolic connection to candyland US. And it is cheap.
In the first try we melted sugar, coloured it and casted it in silicon moulds. At the gallery we made a collection of monkeys with different kinds of sugar and colours.
The experiment continued later back home when we wanted to combine the technique of so called rapid prototyping with small-scale mass-production. In the computer we made a 3D-model of a human skull. The data was then sent to a 3D-printer that made moulds of the skull in silicon. These were then used for making a collection of lollipops with a top of a sugar-skull. The lollipops have been shown at the gallery Monde Radieux in Stockholm and shown and sold at the gallery Millard Sheet in Los Angeles.
So far no death reports of children licking the skulls.