Infinite Capacity 13Al

Amsterdam-based designer, researcher, and artist, Femke Herregraven gained a BA at the ArtEZ Institute of the Arts and an MA at the Design Department of the Sandberg Instituut. Herregraven’s work traverses global finance, information, and geopolitics. She investigates the new material bases, geographies, and value systems that contemporary financial technologies and infrastructures are carving out.

Her project Infinite Capacity 13Al resulted from a research trip to Detroit, where she encountered a number of aluminium storage warehouses. Considering the extensive operations undertaken to mine bauxite from the earth’s crust in order to extract alumina, which is melted down into aluminium, she began reflecting on the anomaly of leaving a part of this aluminium unused and stored in warehouses around the world.

Herregraven discovered the financial market for metals is a curious place; a number of these aluminium storage warehouses facilitate financial speculation. Worldwide, these warehouses form a ‘virtual aluminium space’ that barely releases any aluminium but has a seemingly infinite capacity to take it in. From being deposits in the earth’s crust, aluminium finds a final resting place in this ‘virtual space’. Since real aluminium and warehouses cannot disappear into a virtual nowhere, Infinite Capacity 13Al reflects on where we might encounter this ‘virtual aluminium space’. The project presents a series of 26 blocks of engraved aluminium with an accompanying video.