Put a Nobel Prize winner, a renegade artist, and a few thousand music fans who don’t mind rolling around in the mud as their favourite bands play on stage and you’ve got the makings of something special. This year’s Roskilde Festival truly put the ‘human’ into their traditional mix of humanitarian awareness, art and rock music with a unique piece of artwork.
Kristian von Hornsleth, a 46 year-old Danish conceptual artist, came to Roskilde and collected hair and blood samples from 800 volunteers. He will extract their DNA, add it to a collection of other DNA that spans the global community, and place it inside a sculpture that will be deposited in the deepest place of our planet’s ocean next year. Each participant signed a certificate authenticating their DNA.
Called the Deep Storage Project, von Hornsleth has created an angular, futuristic sculpture five metres tall that will be placed in the Mariana Trench 11,000 metres beneath the surface of the ocean. The Mariana Trench is the world’s deepest undersea region, located 200 miles off Guam Island.
The JP news agency says the artist’s goal was to place the DNA of thousands of people from all walks of life deep within the earth. He feels that in a few millennia their DNA will still be intact, while life on the surface on the planet will have changed in ways we can’t even conceive.
“The sculpture looks as it does because it should not resemble something organic – it’s made up of triangles and sharp points. The idea is that 10,000 years from now, when someone sails by with their deep-sea sonar, they’ll see something down there and retrieve it. The people who donated DNA could be regenerated and maybe even come to Roskilde again,” von Hornsleth explained to Danish public broadcaster DR.
http://jp.dk/uknews/article1741555.ece?page=2