A mud-covered Mercedes-Benz G-Class—a vehicle originally developed for military purposes whose various offroad capabilities are emphasized in the marketing campaign—sits in a meadow as though it had veered off the road. It is a 1:1 replica that Folke Köbberling has made directly from the real-world “luxury off-roader” out of a specially developed bio-based composite material. The sculpture is called Maaaaash!, and the English verb (meaning to crush, pulp, mix) may be a clue as to how the material was produced. Köbberling has already used it to mold three such compostable SUVs, then observed their slow decay over the course of a year (Mash & Heal, 2024). But the title may also be understood as calling on the sculpture itself to mingle with the soil on which it rests during the decomposition process: under the open sky, the composite slowly starts to rot. Elements inside the car are made of other natural materials such as jute, raw wool, cellulose, clay, wheat, earth, and wood, which can serve as shelter for animals and a breeding ground for plants. The chassis and tires are wooden.

Folke Köbberling’s creative practice protests the waste of resources, soil sealing, and the neoliberal pursuit of profits as well as the dominance of the automobile in society, in the urban fabric, and in people’s minds. She has taken cars apart and converted them into bicycles, dismantled cars and shipped them by train, made replicas of cars and crashed them into each other. In collaboration with Martin Kaltwasser, she built a copy of an Audi Q7 SUV, enlarged by 20 percent, out of scrap wood, painted it white, and moored it on the median of Berlin-Neukölln’s Karl-Marx-Straße; for four weeks, it occupied three regular parking spaces, waiting to be destroyed by the weather or by aggrieved locals. But the big white wooden car suffered no damage; people in the neighborhood unexpectedly took a shine to it (White Trash, 2008).

Just after the end of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Köbberling and Kaltwasser erected a larger-than-life bulldozer made of recycled wheatboards on one of the few remaining vacant lots in the vicinity of the Olympic Village. These construction panels had been used to protect surfaces in the apartments from wear and tear by the athletes in order to ensure that the properties remained in pristine condition for the subsequent sale. Exposed to the elements, the panels made of highly compressed wheat straw slowly disintegrated; together with the humus the artists had presciently placed inside the bulldozer, they yielded soil ready for animal and plant colonization and hobby gardeners (The Games Are Open, 2010).

In Maaaaash! on Vienna’s Karlsplatz, too, disintegration marks the beginning of an open-ended sculptural process. Stranded at the tip of the small park between multi-lane roads and clearly visible to drivers passing by, Folke Köbberling’s sculpture will fall apart in a compelling illustration of how absurd the appropriation and privatization of public space by cars is. (Olga Wukounig)