Maria Loboda - The Machine

The Senckenberg program for 2023 kicks off with Maria Loboda’s exhibition The Machine. At the center of the installation is the artist’s first film, The Machine. The lead role is played by an artesian well that gushes water without the aid of any technology. In the machine age these fountains attract enormous attention. They create quite naturally an “aquatic theatre” that would otherwise require a huge apparatus of machinery to stage. Strangely enough, such a well is also in the industrially reshaped landscape of the Messel pit. Loboda’s film describes a surreal journey from Messel and the Eocene Age 50 million years ago, known as the ‘new dawn’, to the machines of the 18th and 19th centuries and through to research labs.