1-Stroke-Sugar-Motor
2021
sculpture
glass, sugar, compost
See U Brussels (BE), Marta Herford (DE)
During a residency in Bassenge, Belgium, the surrounding landscape became a flood zone. In the aftermath — stranded, without reliable heat — the question became practical: how do you generate warmth from what is immediately around you?
1-Stroke Sugar Motor is the answer rendered as sculpture. A single glass cylinder, encased in hardened sugar doughnuts, is packed with composting layers: fruit and vegetable scraps, grass clippings, fallen leaves, dead plant matter, sawdust. As microbes decompose the layers, an exothermic reaction generates heat — temperatures that can reach up to 70°C. Visitors are invited to eat fruit and drop their leftovers inside, slowly refuelling the machine.
The object is legible as a motor, a heater, a digestive organ. Fuelled by sugar and biological process, it produces both warmth and, over time, nutrient-rich soil — waste completing a cycle that industrial systems interrupt. The sculpture asks what it would mean to treat byproducts not as problems to be managed but as energy sources waiting to be activated.
First shown at See U, Brussels (2021), and subsequently at the Marta Herford Museum as part of the Recycling Design Prize (2022) — where its presence among design objects created a productive friction, the work refusing easy categorisation as either art or solution.