Excerpt from press release

Constant Eruptions is Bjarland’s third solo exhibition at Hopstreet Gallery. The exhibition title is inspired by the city Leonia in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities. Leonia is a city that renews itself and all its materials everyday and as a consequence, produces a growing mountain of trash around its peripheries. The text is in many ways a reflection of any Western, consumer-centered city where the cycle of buying new things and throwing away other things, seems as constant as a force of nature.

“On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought, that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. … Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption."