Ugo Rondinone: the alphabet of my mothers and fathers

Ugo Rondinone’s the alphabet of my mothers and fathers consists of twenty-six sets of gilded farm tools, one per letter of the alphabet.

– Ugo Rondinone, the alphabet of my mothers and fathers, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2024

We are nothing without food. The spread of farming led to food surpluses, which spared some of us the dailychore of hunting and gathering. Trades and professions emerged as agriculture grew more efficient with the use of tools, further shrinking the number of people tasked with food production. Farmers, cooks and their tools made us sedentary, enabled cities and empires to arise, encouraged the standardisation of alphabets and numerical systems, and facilitated the proliferation of knowledge and art. Today, in the industrialised world, the workers needed to supply us with food is a tiny, single-digit percentage of the population while farming’s old tools have all but vanished.

Ugo Rondinone’s the alphabet of my mothers and fathers, 2022, consists of twenty-six sets of gilded farm tools, one per letter of the alphabet. Hand-made by their users for countless generations, these were the implements of traditional farming and food preparation. By applying them with gold leaf and mounting them on white squares, Rondinone transforms the tools into regal hieroglyphs of ingenuity and skill.

Runtime: Sat, 14/09/2024 to Sat, 19/10/2024

Takes place here:

• Esther Schipper