Sculptor Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's piece "Nothing is more optimistic than Stjärnsund" is a curator's playset of modified, daisy-chain-able padlocks. I like the idea of a necklace of these things, lying flat like an industrialized, faux-Egyptian burial ornament.
This piece consists of twenty modified padlocks which can be interconnected to create chains or assemblages, as the collector or curator sees fit. The piece is intended as a construction kit with a plethora of possible combinations, like a Meccanno, and is a hommage to Lygia Clark's "Relational Objects". The title is a statement from the diary of the great naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, one of the fathers of modern ecology, from when he visited one of the first automated factories in Stjärnsund, Sweden in the 18th century.
Nothing is more optimistic than Stjärnsund (via Beyond the Beyond)
