Nothing defines the nature of a country better than its demographic structure. From it it is possible to explain and understand all its other variables. From economics to politics, through history or social changes, the population pyramid of a state is an ever-moving photo of its past, present and future. The one in Spain, for example, speaks of a progressively aging and modernized country on whose horizon a great elephant is drawn in the room: the pensions.
But each country has its own peculiarities. From the inverted pyramid of very advanced nations in the last demographic transition, such as Japan or Italy, to the gigantic infant base of nations still very young and poor. Theirs are population regimes anchored in a past where mothers had many children and mortality had begun to decline, propelling unprecedented population growth. We have talked on occasion about the phenomenon and how the fertile revolution, or the fall in the number of children per woman, is reaching Africa.
Perhaps obsessed by the fascinating universe of demographics, the French artist and designer Mathieu Lehanneur some years ago he created a set of sculptures and vessels dedicated to the population pyramids of each nation. The ceramic objects, chrome-plated in black, brought the past and future of some of them to the field of art and abstraction. If in Japan we came across a suggestive and erratic figure, Egypt drew a perfect cone with a wide base and narrow culminating point. In those figures we could turn our political and economic imagination.
Twelve years after its debut, Lehanneur has updated that project. Now titled “State of the World,” the ceramic pieces have been transformed into 3D-printed aluminum sculptures. The result is a collection of 140 figures dedicated to 140 different countries, all of them with their particularities. The collection was exhibited for the first time last week at Design Miami / Basel, a fair dedicated to architecture, sculpture and design in its different variants. Lanneur has relied on the UN database to create the pieces.
“The idea was to make visible and understand all the people who are living on the planet right now,” he explained to Dezeen a few days ago. “I wanted to convert two-dimensional statistics into three-dimensional objects, like rotating objects. You can see that each of the silhouettes is different from all the others,” he adds.
And it certainly is. The planet’s population becomes in Lehanneur’s hands a collection of various spinning tops. Some are flattened and robust; Some are completely asymmetrical, with a narrow base and a very wide central body, the result of their fertile decline; and there are like huge inverted funnels. The choice of aluminum, the artist develops, is due to its molding capacity: “It makes sense to be extremely precise because every millimeter of the sculptures symbolizes thousands of years.” In this sense, State of the World follows the path of its previous projects, in which it transferred real-world phenomena to the physical plane.
Here you can see how the exhibition was. And here are some examples: