When, at the end of August 2016, it emerged that more than 300 reindeers were struck by lightning on the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in southern Norway, Julius von Bismarck immediately booked the next flight. A chartered fishing boat brought him and his team near; a day and a half later, he stood before the site of a natural catastrophe of historical proportions. The sad trophies of this journey are 130 antler tips of different lengths, sometimes a few centimetres, sometimes up to 30 cm long, which he took from the animal carcasses on the spot. Each individual antler tip, which is mounted in stainless steel for this exhibition and placed on a metal rod at the height of a reindeer head, testifies to the relentless brutality of nature, which is so inexplicable to us.
Julius von Bismarck is interested in various concepts of nature: he confronts the Western dogma of nature as an environment that is in need of protection with the image of nature as a punishing deity, a natural force which invariably devastates and is to be soothed and worshipped.
