Corrupted Air

Femke Herregraven

Corrupted Air

In her practice, Herregraven draws from a systematic meta-narrative that accompanies her research and production at all times. It concerns financial and geological self-organising systems, in which flows of energy create creative and destructive consequences that change the course of history. 

the work ‘Corrupted Air’ (2018) is installed consisting of two conjoined lightboxes. Herregraven has compiled a table of all catastrophe bonds (catbonds) dating from 1996 through to 2018 and placed it alongside the first mortality table from John Graunt’s Bills of Mortality published in London in 1662, a mere three years before the outbreak of the Great Plague. 

The historic mortality table or “List of Casualties” does not incorporate the ages of the deceased, but catalogues the causes of death and thus illuminates the reemergence and distribution of particular symptoms and pandemics. This historic categorization and collection of death cases appear to be a preliminary stage of human impulse to find some sort of indexicality of mortalities.