(2021)
Public sculpture at Gárdonyi square in Budapest




Shimmer is a public sculpture that explores shifting time scales through sculpting and storytelling. The sculpture triggers a thousand-year-old collaboration with the ever-evolving ecosystem of lichens and the rocks of Pilis Mountain. It was created together with architecture students as part of a collective-making workshop led by Fuzzy Earth in 2021 at Ostrom. The sculpture is formed by a sequence of terrazzo segments. Each segment is uniquely composed creating various densities, cavities, channels, and textures on the surface. These ornamental geometric shapes were created in alliance with the lichen. 

Shimmer is aging right now at Gárdonyi square in Budapest. Over the next years, decades, and centuries lichens will slowly occupy the surface of the sculpture. Lichen’s celestial lifespan makes them muted protagonists of the Anthropocene and effortless successors of the climate emergencies we face today. Shimmer also exists in the virtual world as a 3D point cloud. We use photogrammetry to capture the changing micro-landscapes of the sculpture and to monitor the lichen population.







Read more: Landscapes-yet-to-come
Landscapes-yet-to-come is a collection of speculaive narratives that imagines the future lichen worlds of Shimmer illustrated by 3D scanned micro lichen landscapes.








Images by Fuzzy Earth, Ádám Ackermann, Márton Révai
Sculpture commissioned by Bartók Béla Boulevard
Ostrom collective-making workshop organized by Építész Szakkollégium
Workshop leaders: Tekla Gedeon and Sebastian Gschanes
Workshop participants: Laura Bacher, Zsófia Magdolna Baksa, Anna Kaposi-Ly, Bogdán Kiss, Marcell Korhán, Orsi Kroneraff, Vencel Kustra, András Paragi