Sovereign Sisters

Sovereign Sisters seeks to summon the undead spirits of infrastructure and automatism.

René de Saint-Marceaux's 1907 granite and bronze statue, which still stands in Kleine Schanze Park, Bern, exalts the imperial ambition of the Union Postale Universelle, the organisation founded in 1874 to standardise the postal communication of Empire and which continues to plan the planet's postal networks from its present day home within the United Nations. Conceived and conceptualised by The Otolith Group and 3D scanned and animated by ScanLab, Sovereign Sisters does not document the contemporary condition of the monument to the Universal Postal Union but instead de-realises its seemingly anachronistic aesthetic. In spectralising its deification of global communication into a grayscale pointcloud, Sovereign Sisters seeks to summon the undead spirits of infrastructure and automatism that lie dormant and sublimated within Saint-Marceaux's patriarchitecture of monument as maiden.