Sophie Gogl: Storno

With the onset of modern travel culture, the demand for large steamer trunks declined. Trains, cars, and finally airplanes required smaller items of luggage. Today, luggage in carry-on size and trolleys are everyday objects. The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic put a sudden end to travelling, all international travels had to be cancelled. During the shutdown, the practical companions turned into relics of a carefree time and even more, with regard to climate change, they could be viewed as a memorial for environmentally harmful low-cost flights. 

 

For her exhibition at the MAK, artist Sophie Gogl created Storno, an overall installation resembling an airport terminal abandoned long ago. Different models of suitcases can be found in this utopian setting including fake metal detectors and artificial plants: open or closed, painted and with personalized stickers, with artificial moss or little mushroom sculptures made of clay growing on them. They serve as a frame for portraits of important people from pop culture and TV series whose attitude towards climate change and society the artist views critically. However, they also act as containers for arrangements of objects and sculptures which are “preserved” in a kind of “microclimate” as relics and snapshots of our consumer society. 

 

The artist also addresses the fact that the production of travel luggage was once a craftsmanship that today has become a low-cost production mostly in low-wage countries. Nowadays, neither traveling nor the production of luggage is a sustainable and environmentally conscious activity. Both have become a “disposable product” and a factor impacting the current climate crisis. 

 

With Storno, Sophie Gogl aims at honoring a temporary era of downtime and “anti-spectacle” (cf. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, 1967) in which we are forced to engage in the present. The scenery of the exhibition is not only a place to reflect upon the climate situation in the context of the COVID crisis but also a place of deception: Are we really at the airport? And if so, given that for weeks it was considered a luxury to move freely in the area we live in, what for? The visit to the museum turns into a journey and a newly gained spectacle. 

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Sophie Gogl completed her graduate degree in Fine Arts: Painting and Animated Film, headed by Prof. Judith Eisler, in 2017. The artist is represented by the Viennese gallery Zeller van Almsick.  
zellervanalmsick.com/sophiegogl