‘ENCODE’ for The Venice Glass Week, from 5th till the 13th September 2020, Venice

The Venice Glass Week is the internal festival dedicated by the city of Venice, to one of its most treasured crafts - glass making. For the fourth edition, #TheHeartOfGlass, Onar created ‘ENCODE’, an installation of hot-formed and cold-cut glass mice figures with metal cast tails, presented at Palazzo Loredan. For glass artist Felekşan Onar, ENCODE is the result of a reflection after having lived in three major cities with long histories as urban centers - Istanbul, Venice and New York. It began with a preoccupation with the similarities that Onar encountered between such vastly different urbanscapes and the notion of dwelling in a major city: Residents of these grand cities are often not temporary but rather ‘persistent occupiers’.

As contemporary life in large urban conglomerates becomes more and more challenging and chaotic, whether it is due to size or overpopulation or environmental change, human persistence in places, over long periods of time, comes also with changing interactions with the natural world: As other species also need to become adaptive and thrive in our loop system of production and waste. The invisible and underground life of our cities is populated by colonies of mice, whose population increases exponentially as our lives become more and more embedded in complex systems of urbanization, drainage and disposal. And there’s a long cultural history of our lives together with rodents, since the birth of agriculture in the Neolithic age.

As populations of humans consume produce and livestock and store grains, mice became a part of our everyday life, often with disastrous consequences such as plagues and diseases, the result of uncontrolled colonies. Subsequently they became less and less visible in modern cities, but still they are still ubiquitous and an alarming sign of the environmental crises that we have created. It is also significant that at the turn of the 20th century, mice were also turned into mediatic metaphors for migration in many countries, unwilling to resettle those fleeing war and conflict. The parallel behavioral patterns of humans and rodents were observed by the glass artist Onar, who wanted to open up a debate about the systemic imbalances of our cities.

The project ENCODE reflects on a variety of scientific findings on animal behavior, which bears also insights on our position as persistent occupiers that we share with other species. At a time when migration has become a part of contemporary life, in a landscape defined by overcrowding and resilience, Onar questions the conditions of our living together with many different kinds of others, and the vast numbers of those invisible others that are forced to thrive under difficult conditions. The artist turns to the language of glass as a cultural metaphor for a long history of interactions, going back to the very beginning of human settlements and the persistence of their survival.