Sugar Trees

part of the exhibition Sugar Theatre

Sugars are the adjectives of the body. They are what specifies and sophisticates the inner processes of a cell — a third language of life, with a vocabulary and a grammar of its own, sitting between the cell and its environment. That description came from the researchers at the Copenhagen Center for Glycomics, and it set the rule for the work.

On the surface of a cell, glycans assemble into branching trees. Sugar Trees grows the same trees out of language. It reads articles as The Guardian publishes them and keeps only their adjectives; ordered by their length in letters, those adjectives form first the trunk, then the branches, and last the leaves. One article, one tree. Because the feed never stops no tree repeats, and the trees register what kind of day it has been.

One of four acts in Morten Søndergaard’s exhibition at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences in Copenhagen, alongside Sugar Contact, Sugar Organ and Sugar Choir — the last of which we also produced: eight singers, each on their own screen, performing research texts from two glycomics laboratories that alternately compete and harmonise.

Concept Morten Søndergaard with Hiren Jitendra Joshi, Hans W. Wandall, Obscura Vertigo and Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology
Programming & production Obscura Vertigo
Exhibition From January 2017, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen mortensoendergaard.com/sugar-theatre
ResearchGroup http://glycomics.ku.dk/