Christoph Weber

Greenwashed Concrete, Reverse Imagining
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Austria °1974
research interests: Technosphere, Socio-ecological Transformation, degrowth, climate crisis, New Materialism, Agential realism, Concrete, posthumanism, social metabolism, deep time, intra-action, Sculpture, Photography
affiliation: Zentrum Fokus Forschung, University of Applied Arts, Vienna
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Christoph Weber studied conceptual art at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien, Sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig where he completed his studies with the postgraduate degree Meisterschüler. 

http://christophweber.org/

He is a conceptual sculptor with a focus on materiality and methodological reenactment. He develops projects that reflect on the politics of human intra-actions with the environment through sculptural material transformations and research-based interrogations. He creates settings of situated perception to navigate historical and speculative future contexts. Concrete - the most widely used substance on earth after water, has become a medium for Christoph Weber to critically question the state of global communities. This thoroughly universal, utopian, modernist and partly emancipatory material is also highly destructive and greenwashed - with implicit contradictions that point to tensions within human societies, the technosphere and the planetary future.

 

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research expositions

  • Greenwashed Concrete. Artistic Research With, On, and Against Concrete, Concerning Conflicting Concepts of Its Sustainability (2024) author(s): Christoph Weber, Nikolaus Eckhard published in: Journal for Artistic Research
    Environmental science has shown that the global use of concrete has led to significant challenges today and will seriously trouble future generations. Nevertheless, international building industries advertise concrete as a natural, regional, sustainable, and hence green material. In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass, with concrete accounting for nearly half of it, making it a signal of the Capitalocene. A radical transformation of industrial building culture is asked for, otherwise anthropogenic mass will be three times biomass by 2040. The growth of the technosphere is amplifying multiple negative currents in the pluriverse — air pollution, lithospheric extraction, and hydrosphere depletion — all with catastrophic effects on biodiversity. This exposition displays the steps in and findings of the artistic research project Greenwashed Concrete. Setting out to widen understanding of the multi-layered material concrete, this project applied a methodology of juxtaposing two sculptural practices in order to collaboratively design experimental settings to engage scholars from heterogeneous fields. Download Accessible PDF
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