An Ecological Installation on Capitalism and Community
$Edge, 2014, Site-specific installation / ephemeral installation
Bioplastic made from maize starch, glycerine, water and vinegar; local Australian sand; wood
Approximately 100 oversized Australian bull ants, approx. 30 × 20 × 20 cm each
Life on the Edge, Arid Lands Festival, Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden, Port Augusta, South Australia, Australia
Award: First Prize, Biennial Arid Sculptural Exhibition, Port Augusta, 2014
Documentation: video and photography
Created in 2014 for Life on the Edge, part of the Arid Lands Festival in Port Augusta, South Australia, $Edge was a site-specific installation in the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden. The work consisted of approximately one hundred oversized Australian bull ants, cast from bioplastic, local sand and wood, and arranged as a large dollar sign in a planted bed. The ants stood upright in the landscape, forming a recognisable economic symbol while also appearing as individual bodies. At the upper and lower ends of the sign, several ants seemed to leave the structure, continuing into a path beyond it.
The installation was developed in close response to the site. Before travelling to Australia, Kirsten Wechslberger studied images from previous editions of the festival and began to imagine a work that would belong to the arid landscape rather than be placed upon it. Port Augusta’s intense heat, dryness and desert-like atmosphere resonated strongly with her experience of Namibia. Although the landscapes, histories and cultural contexts are distinct, the environment felt strangely familiar. This connection opened a wider field of associations around land, scarcity, resources, colonial histories and the social conditions of living at the edge.
At the time, the central concern of $Edge was social marginalisation. The festival title, Life on the Edge, became both a spatial and political proposition. The “edge” refers not only to a geographical threshold or the outer limit of a landscape, but also to the margins of social belonging. The installation asks who is pushed to the edges of society, by which systems, and through which narratives such exclusion becomes acceptable.
Rather than addressing one specific community, $Edge reflects on recurring structures of exclusion. It points to people and groups marginalised through poverty, racism, colonial histories, disability, psychological vulnerability, gender, sexuality, class or restricted access to resources. These forms of marginalisation do not operate separately from economic systems; they are often reinforced by them. Societies create stories about who is deserving, who is responsible for their own hardship and whose suffering can be ignored. Such narratives allow inequality to appear natural, necessary or deserved.
The dollar sign functions as the installation’s central symbolic form. Yet $Edge is not a rejection of money itself. Money is treated as a medium: a tool that can circulate, support and enable, but also accumulate, exclude and structure power. The critique is directed at a profit-driven logic in which growth, competition and individual achievement are valued above care, shelter, dignity and collective responsibility. Within such a logic, exclusion is not an accidental failure at the margins of society. It becomes part of the system’s design. Those who already have limited access to land, education, healthcare, income, safety or recognition are pushed further towards the edge.
This critique also resonates with colonial and postcolonial realities. In Namibia, as in Australia, Indigenous peoples and other marginalised communities continue to live with the consequences of dispossession, unequal access to resources and social devaluation. $Edge does not attempt to speak for a particular community or tell a single national history. Instead, it traces a broader pattern: the production of narratives that diminish certain groups in order to justify exclusion, exploitation or neglect. The work asks how economic systems, social prejudice and inherited histories become entangled.
The original concept also drew on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When basic physiological and safety needs remain unmet, belonging, recognition, self-actualisation and self-transcendence become fragile possibilities rather than accessible human capacities. $Edge translates this social and psychological tension into spatial form. The ants are gathered inside the dollar sign, yet some begin to move beyond it. Their colour gradually shifts from pale, almost white sand towards darker brown tones that merge with the earth of the botanical garden. This movement away from the symbol suggests adaptation, transition and the possibility of another path.
The choice of ants was both ecological and social. Wechslberger chose Australian bull ants because they are specific to the region and possess a striking physical presence. Large, defensive and visually powerful, bull ants are not harmless decorative creatures. Their heads, mandibles and upright bodies give them an alert, almost confrontational quality. In the installation they appear as autonomous and resilient beings, occupying the site with a quiet but insistent force.
At the same time, ants offer a compelling model of collective intelligence. Their colonies create systems of shelter, nourishment, cooperation and protection that are not organised around profit. This does not mean that ant societies should be romanticised or treated as simple blueprints for human life. Ants also compete, defend territory and fight other colonies. Yet they offer a useful counter-image to the extreme individualisation of human societies. If other living beings can organise shared systems of survival, why do human societies so often fail to secure food, shelter, safety and dignity for all?
The installation can also be read as a narrative field of objects. The ants carry several contexts at once: local Australian sand, the artist’s experimental material processes, her Namibian background, the festival theme and a critique of global inequality. Material, site and story are inseparable. The ants are not merely representations of insects; they become carriers of histories, landscapes and social questions. Their meaning emerges through the relationship between where they are placed, what they are made from and what they are asked to signify.
Material research is central to $Edge. The ants were made from a biodegradable mixture of maize starch, glycerine, water and vinegar, combined with different kinds of local sand. Each sand behaved differently. Pale sand responded differently from darker sand; some mixtures became brittle, others more stable, while some were difficult to drill when the legs had to be inserted. The process remained experimental, tactile and responsive, shaped as much by the behaviour of the material as by the original plan.
This ecological concern extended to the mould-making process. Earlier silicone moulds were durable, but conflicted with the sustainable intentions of the work. Wechslberger therefore experimented with latex, rubber and plaster, despite their greater fragility and the additional time they required. Sustainability was not treated as a theme added to the installation from the outside. It shaped the ethics of production itself. The question was not only what the work said, but how it could be made without contradicting its own ecological commitments.
Ephemerality was equally important. $Edge was conceived to remain on site after the exhibition and gradually decompose through wind and weather. In the dry climate of Port Augusta, this process unfolded slowly over several months and was documented over time. At one point, real ants began to dismantle parts of the artificial ants, using the bioplastic as a food source. The installation therefore returned to ecological cycles not only as metaphor, but as material event.
This slow disintegration is central to the work’s meaning. A dollar sign, often read as a symbol of power, permanence and control, is made here from matter designed to break down. It appears, becomes legible, changes, loses its form and is eventually absorbed back into the landscape. In doing so, $Edge suggests that social and economic systems are not fixed natural laws. They are historical, material and political constructions. They can decay, be reorganised or be left behind.
Spatially, the installation moved between image, path and sculptural field. The pale sand of the dollar sign stood out against the darker earth of the botanical garden, while the ants leaving the symbol gradually became darker, merging visually with their surroundings. Visitors could walk alongside the work and encounter it both as a single recognisable sign and as a gathering of individual sculptural bodies. The repetition of the ants created a tension between individuality and collectivity: each figure remained distinct, yet together they formed an economic symbol that the work both invoked and unsettled.
Art historically, $Edge sits within environmental art, ephemeral installation, socially engaged practice, ecological material research and site-specific art. Unlike monumental forms of classical Land Art, it does not seek to impose a permanent mark on the landscape. Instead, it introduces a temporary, weathering sign into the site, using materials intended to disintegrate. The botanical garden is not treated as a neutral setting, but as an ecological, social and symbolic field in which questions of survival, adaptation and belonging can unfold.
Within Kirsten Wechslberger’s wider practice, $Edge is an independent work closely connected to later investigations of materiality, ecology and ephemerality, but it is not part of the Minaminals series. It shares with those later works an interest in bioplastic, sand, decomposition, small living beings and ecological cycles. Its conceptual emphasis, however, is distinct. While the Minaminals works turn more directly towards soil organisms, biodiversity and regenerative processes, $Edge centres capitalism, social marginalisation and collective systems of survival.
$Edge was awarded First Prize at the Biennial Arid Sculptural Exhibition at the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden. The exhibition brought together local and invited artists and attracted a broad public in Port Augusta. This recognition marked an important moment in Wechslberger’s international practice and affirmed the early visibility of her engagement with ecological material research, socially critical installation and site-specific art.
Ultimately, $Edge presents a dollar sign only to make it unstable. Formed by ants, carried by sand, altered by weather and eventually taken back into the landscape, the symbol becomes temporary, vulnerable and porous. The work asks what holds societies together, whom they exclude, and what other forms of coexistence might become possible when profit is no longer treated as the organising principle of life.
