Rutger de Regt

The Netherlands

A project recreating an artificial landscape inspired by everything that we extract from the earth and what we store and deposit into the earth. Illustrating the slow but steady replacement of crust materials by synthetic materials.

When organic matter turns into oil, we rearrange molecules into plastics and otherworldly materials, it can create a problem for all living organisms and has the potential to generate problems with greater impact than the damage chlorofluorocarbons had on the ozone layer and leaded fuel on human health. As we filter out sulfur and heavy metals from our chemical processes, we sequestrate all these toxic and harmful by-products into the earth’s crust. Sequestration a euphemism for burying these chemicals under our roads, our playground and parks or dumping them in the ocean. Carbon Extraction is a visual dystopia reminding us that the molecular alteration of our environment can lead to changes in all four spheres of our world.