HATCH

HATCH
Benedikte Bjerre
22/09 – 28/10/23
Open Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm and by appointment.

September 22 1980, Lech Wałęsa, future Polish president, founded the Solidarność trade union after recently negotiating the Gdańsk agreement to end the fortnight long strike at Lenin Shipyard, an event which was instrumental in the eventual undermining of communist rule in Poland, which ceased 9 years later. Meanwhile, 24 miles north in Puszcza Darżlubska a tree, one among hundreds of saplings being planted that Monday was put in the ground. A Scots Pine, planted as a bet against the future, that we’ll still need trees in the future, as we have for the last 160,000 years or so. 42 years, 5.5 billion births and 2 billion deaths later, this tree is felled by an American branded Harvester, produced in Finland, by a local contractor hired by the Polish state forestry agency. The tree, among others – circa 90 million in this year, for this company alone – is transported over land to a Lichtenstein owned Ikea Industry AB factory in Sweden by a truck produced in the Netherlands for a German owned Swedish brand. Once in Sweden the timber is chipped, heat treated and processed into particle board. This material is then passed out of the Inter Ikea Group of companies briefly to Gyllensvaans Mobler in Kättilstorp on the August 8 2023, who received 600 tonnes that day and used this particleboard to produce BILLY Bookcases. The bookcases are manufactured by Japanese produced robots, with no human intervention at a rate of one every 3 seconds, which are then sold back to Netherlands based Inter IKEA Systems B.V at around £5 per unit. The bookcases go direct to a Swiss headquarted Ikea Supply AB distribution centre for onward shipping to the Ikea franchise in Braehead, Renfrewshire. Ikea sells a Billy bookcase every 5 seconds, by their estimate. August 30 2023, a Glasgow based organisation purchased 14 Billy Bookcases, 18 Nisse chairs and a 1 Fixa screwdriver on behalf of a Danish artist. As the cardboard boxes were opened the melamine coated particleboard was touched by human hands for the first time since it was a young tree being planted back in September 1980.

Photo credit: Max Slaven

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