Monument of Sugar is a research into Europe’s subsidized sugar exports. To turn the flow of sugar around, the artists produced a sugar sculpture in Nigeria and shipped it to Europe. A written essay and documentary sequences chart their investigations into the sugar trade and their experiences when producing and transporting the monument.
Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan:
“We visited Hrebenne, a small rural village at the Polish-Ukrainian border, on the day the expansion of the European Union went into effect. While we observed the growing queue of cars on both sides of the border, we spoke to a Polish farmer. He offered us homemade sausages and coffee. When he handed us the sugar, he joked that the Polish cukier had become twice as sweet since their entry into the European Union. The price had multiplied from one day to the next. As a result, Polish sugar was now even cheaper in the Ukraine than in Poland itself.” (quote from the film essay Monument of Sugar)
The installation Monument of Sugar consists of a floor sculpture of 304 sugar modules and a 16 mm silent film essay of 67 minutes. The film essay charts our investigations into the sugar trade and our experiences when producing and transporting the monument. Silent documentary sequences explore the landscapes of agriculture, industry, market, transit, and the slow and laborious process of producing the sugar blocks. These cinematic scenes are intersected by slowly scrolling texts on white backgrounds, that give an account of our field work and production.
On the World of Matter web platform we include parts of the documentary footage, as well as the narrative of the film’s running titles in writing.
