MEGAYAPROJECT

The Dilldapp Memorial 2019
Fonderia Battaglia, Milano

IV. The Dilldapp Memorial (The Realm of Laughing and Crying, Negative and Positive)

When lava floats after a volcanic erruption and turns into static shape, the stream collects, destroys and fuses particles and gases into new constellations and chemical compounds.
Transfering this idea to the fate of Pompeii we realize that many new molecular and atomic fusions took place when the Vesuvius surprised the nearby city through its sudden breakout. Lava and toxic gases melted physical entities into new constellation, leaving us speculating about these objects only through its existence in the negative space and its ghostly presents.

When In the night of the 26th of April 1986, during a security test two explosions in the Chernobyl Powerplant were caused, a manmade volcano erupted creating a secretive object that got known as the elephant foot.

Deciphering an object like the elephant foot makes one realize that it burries physical information, atomic structures as well as a spiritual, dematerialized informations.

Central piece and protagonist of this presentation is a Memorial. A memorial realized for my Alter Ego, The Dilldapp. A creature that assumingly entered my mind not even a year after my birth and since than hasn’t left.

The project was started under the term „Negativo“, a negative space that I interpreted through the archeologic practice of excavation. By this excavation can be understood as a physical as well as mental practice that is close to psychoanalysis by digging out personal archetypes connected to traumas and childhood.
A sculpture fuses physically ideas as well as mental ones.
In case of the Dilldapp ,a metaphor of myself, I burried myself to dig myself out by inventing this character. The journey I took within this creature was a physical research as well as a journey through memories.

Somewhere between these lines the Dilldapp was born

The fact that my practice in the last two years was strongly informed through the tectonic, geographic as well as mythologic history of volcanoes was linked to a journey the Dilldapp and I went on, first visiting places I dreamt of like Hawaii and Pompeii. I realized soon that It was not the Vesuvius, Kilauea and the Campi Flegrei the Dilldapp wanted to show me but the fact that manmade vulcanos exist in our civilizations. Technologic developed volcanos in form of nuclear powerplants. Ones that process highly radioactive material instead of lava. Together we arrived at the place of my nightmares and fears, Chernobyl. My Rebirth in 1986, at age one, as the Dilldapp.

The project can be seen as a mental scan performed on this character, a cryptic analysis, the processed information can only be display vaguely since the scanner, my brain, does not have a matching software.

- Veit Laurent Kurz (2020)