sacrificial protection brings together artists Chok Si Xuan and Victoria Hertel in a new artistic collaboration that probes the relationship between constructed and natural processes through the lens of tropical technology.

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Tropical environments pose unique challenges for technology, where high temperatures, humidity and rainfall increase the rate of weathering and corrosion of urban infrastructures. In such climates, time is accelerated for these materials as metal rusts, rain seeps through concrete, and objects are reclaimed by the environment.

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sacrificial protection takes its name from a corrosion protection method where a more active metal prevents a primary metal from rusting. Evoking on one hand the material harshness of oxidised metal, sacrificial protection also speaks to a softer practice of care and mutual co-constitution with our environment, where the bodily comes into contact with the elemental. Re-imagining an approach to tropical technology that does not resist climatic factors, we consider how humidity, moisture, sunlight, and corrosion can be integrated into the artwork itself.

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Uniting both artists’ approaches is a dedicated interest in techno-organic interfaces of being. In Victoria Hertel’s interactive installations, she creates material encounters and sensory systems to capture traces of the formless – be it presence through sound, evaporating water paths, or the scents of one’s skin. Chok Si Xuan similarly engages with corporeal entanglements through kinetic sculptures and installations which consider the materiality and affect of technology.

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sacrificial protection is a product of an extended engagement with mutual ways of thinking and making. Responding to each other’s practices as well as the environmental conditions of the site, the artists aim to prompt different attentions to urban weathering, tropical technology, and the effects of time on material transformations.