'Bold and courageous in her refusal to accept the human violence done to other sentient beings across the planet, down to the depths of the oceans, the artist K49814 has gifted us her provocative and deeply empathic photos in the book Filamenta. Stalking the heart of the fishing industry, K49814 gathered and cleaned millions of fish scales, the so-called 'waste product' found in every kind of net, in the holds of trawlers and seiners and the bellies of enormous factory ships, on slippery docks and in the sluices of processing and canning factories. With her photographs, K49814 became both witness and weaver of light and dark. She succeeds in drawing our attention to the emptying of the seas, while at the same time evoking the absence of a fixed reality, our interdependence, and reminds us that our existence arises only in relation to the others we are driving to extinction' (Joslyn Barnes, President of Louverture Films). In her second book Filamenta published by Kehrer Verlag, the artist working under the pseudonym K49814 addresses the vanishing underwater life caused by overfishing and the daily brutality inflicted on individual living beings - brutality that, world-wide, is barely addressed by any animal protection laws. In 61 poetic visual stories, reminiscent in their cyclical interwovenness of Robert Schumann's Scenes from Childhood she weaves the endless filaments of the fishing industry into (wounded) delicacies like sacred embroideries: swim bladders still filled with the breath of fish, blood vessels of a mackerel that resemble a wintry avenue of trees, or fins turning into wings. This deadly, ocean-emptying, human-made netting is contrasted by K49814 with the filaments that extend as magnificent webs through the cosmos and all life forms on our planet, enabling a constant exchange of meaning and will - of life. With this book, she hopes to help untangle the destructive meshes and engage in the process of communication within this grand fabric of being. The black-and-white images in this artist's book were created over a span of seven years in connection with her work on a large, ephemeral land art installation, which serves as the starting point for a feature film to be released soon. (World premiere expected in fall 2025; further details to follow.)
