Marjolijn Dijkman
Biography
Marjolijn practice addresses the human desire for knowledge, often focusing on topics where culture intersects with other fields of enquiry. The works themselves can be seen as a form of science fiction; partly based on facts and research but often brought into the realm of fiction, abstraction and speculation.
Informed by research and interdisciplinary collaborations, her working method interweaves and investigates collective narratives in relation to the commons, broadly construed.
About the artwork
That What Makes Us Human makes a critical analogy with a scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey – The Dawn of Man which ends with an incident where one ape kills another with a bone which signifies the ugliness of modern humanity. The ape throws a bone into the air as a sign of victory, after which the audience is directly diverted to an orbiting nuclear satellite in outer space, transitioning millions of years in the future. The bone illustrates mankind’s evolutionary step and the satellite is the futuristic outcome. This scene shows the beginning of the Palaeolithic Era and reveals that, ‘by the usage of tools, man could stop being a victim of the world to become an active element, who has the power of action over nature’.
That What Makes Us Human consists of a 3D printed titanium facsimile of a metal meteorite that fell down from space, and is shaped similarly to the flint tools we used at the time of impact around 50.000 years ago. The impact happened at a moment in human history which for a long time has been marked as the period when we became ‘human’ and suddenly more rapidly started to develop modern cognition and behaviour according to some scientific theories.
An hypereaslistic 3D print allows Marjolijn to reproduce and stage a possible moment of the beginning of our humanity.
