Horse, reconstructed

Installation / Found machine part, steel, expanding foam / 100 x 130 x 45 cm, 2025

Horse, reconstructed is a side work produced for installation Refrigerator as Exhibition Space.

This work builds on the concept of fossil creation explored in Damage and Restoration(2024), where damaged engines render machines irreparable—similar to how essential body parts, once destroyed, leave only remnants. In this analogy, machine engines are like bones, while outer parts are akin to soft tissues—less critical and more easily replaced. These broken engines, preserved and displayed, become mechanical “fossils.”

Refrigerator as Exhibition Space (2025), the museum takes the form of a freezer—a cold machine preserving an Ice Age animal fossil. Unlike in Damage and Restoration, where only skeletal remains persist, ice allows the preservation of soft tissues, opening the door to fuller reconstructions.

Reconstruction began with a mysterious machine part. Upon discovering wheels underneath, the process shifted toward creating a movable structure. An axle and 3D-printed handle were added to enable mobility. Another axis was added according to the brushes, which spread an anti-rust liquid through the machine's movement.

Starting from a functional machine part, and drawing parallels with the historical role of animals as laborers, the reconstructed form becomes a horse—once a working animal, now reduced to a pet, sports icon, or symbolic figure. The horse thus embodies both the fossilized past and our evolving relationship with machines, animals, and nature.

The direction of the reconstruction of last stages was influenced by Extincting species (2023), which explored the link between organic and mechanical systems, and our increasingly abstract relationship with nature. As natural environments become curated spaces, akin to museums, our perception of their function and value shifts. During the Industrial Revolution, animals also began to retreat from cities to rural areas throughout Europe and elsewhere. According to John Berger, who writes about the disappearance and appearance of animals during different technological periods in his book Why Look At Animals, this shift led to a tendency toward realistic depictions of animal species in toys.