The exciting microcosm in the rainwater ditch just outside of our house is an impression that often emerges from my childhood memories. This was the place where I perhaps acquired my very first direct experiences of the living world surrounding me. In the summer it was teeming with a variety of wriggling, swimming and crawling larvae, insects, worms and who knows what other types of visible and invisible creatures, whose enthrallingly rich world offered an endless source of excitement in those days. Now as an adult I find the discovery of the mosquito larvae swimming in the rainwater cistern to give rise to very different emotions. Somehow this peaceful, inner world does not fit the urban environment.



For the installation called „Incubators,” I took old-fashioned lightbulbs. First of all, I removed the main cause of their obsolescence, the inefficient tungsten filaments inside, which is the reason why they are gradually being phased out from production. I then installed LEDs emitting blue light, thus causing a counter-selective evolution in light-bulb manufacturing. The empty bulbs will hereafter serve as a kind of insect incubators. The living world that can be discovered inside these bulbs presents all phases of the short life-cycle of mosquitoes from the growth of the larvae through the pupa stage to the fully developed imagos. Of course, this incubator also represents the maximum living space for these insects, as they perish for lack of appropriate food and fall back into the original medium of their metamorphosis.