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ROADKIL(L)N
Diploma project by Sabrina Rosina
2025 - 26
ceramical sculptures / urns
stoneware, glazes self-developed
details per piece on sub-sites
Roadkil(l)n: #01 #02 #03 #04 #05 #06 #07 #08 #09 #10 #11 #12 #13 #14 #15 #16 #17 #18 #19 #20 #21
Artistic Practice :
Since the project of death blindness started forming in my head two years ago, I picked up an artistic practice to accompany me in my everday life. I started caring for the Roadkill. The run over by cars. The trampled upon. The stuck in a fence to die. By pausing all errands and witness them for a moment. Then pick them up (sometimes literally scratch them from the asphalt) and take care of their bodies. Store them in a freezer in a body bag until the funeral is prepared. Create an urn for them. Cremate them in it in the kiln. Make their ashes the glaze for the urn. Each body now a sculpture to remain in our environment of everyday life. To softly remind us every time we dust the shelf with the weird urn on it, that we cared and will continue to do so too. Until no more Roadkill shall be.
Roadkill:
The historian Brian Ladd has given a much more nuanced definition of roadkill, which I would like to share here: “In the American ideology of heedless progress, “roadkill” has also become a label for anything and anyone standing in the way of the relentless march of destiny. The fate of these obstructionists is unvarying: the speeding locomotive – or rather, the speeding car – of progress will flatten them.”(Ladd 2008, 13) Now one might say, that accidents have always happened and always will – but there is a certain threshold for when something happens at a large enough scale, it is no longer a pure accident, but part of a system. Therefore I came up with the capitalized version of Roadkill I like to use: It marks a broader systemic condition of animal deaths produced by the infrastructures of late capitalism. And with my sculptures, with my intense practice of care, I ask to acknowledge these beings again for what they were and what fate they shared. All urns are therefore also equipped with the info of species name, IUCN red-list status, exact GPS-coordinates where they were found and in some cases also photos from these locations.
Research:
Studies from across Europe estimate that our roads kill ~194 million birds and ~29 million mammals every year. Some species manage to absorb the losses; others will likely be driven toward extinction by traffic alone (Grilo et al. 2020). Car infrastructure kills indiscriminately. Measures designed to mitigate the damage, like green bridges, underpasses, fencing, might help small segments of life, but the larger patterns remain. Scientists have discovered that sometime during the 20th century roadkill surpassed hunting as “the leading direct human cause of vertebrate mortality on land.” (Forman and Alexander 1998, 212) And that is not because we stopped hunting, but because we built so many roads. Roads draw hard corridors through once-continuous territories and either fragment or eliminate entire habitats. In the age of the Anthropocene – or, how I find more fitting, the Homogenocene - our co-critters out there are dying as a result of the worlds we have created for us. Mostly unaware that these habitats are not entirely of our own making, but also shaped by the many other species living there. But the rats, pigeons, foxes, eagles – all of them constantly reshape the shared landscapes we live in.
The term roadkill found its definition in North America, where until today the most likely encounter with e.g. a wild coyote is one flattened on the side of the road. In car-centered societies, one of the most likely ways to encounter shy species is by meeting them with the hood of your car – or post-mortem baked into the asphalt. I myself have learned a lot about the local biodiversity of some places by getting stopped in my tracks from roadkill – minus the car. I walk. I bike. I am slow enough to see. Which consequently means I do not meet the classical roadkill very often, as I am not part of norm-core road traffic. Instead I meet the smaller critters I share my everyday environments with. Lots of flattened pigeons in the narrow streets of Vienna. But the more I paid attention, the more I saw and learned. I admired bats and green lizards walking in the occupied lands of the ZAD in France, learned about one of the population hot spots in Austria for ground squirrels by commuting to Donaufestival via bike and train instead of car and got stunned by a dead representative of the only waterfront population of the majestic griffon vultures in Croatia.
How to Care:
This very vulture has become the center piece of my Roadkil(l)n series so far. Before I encountered its death, I only had to take care of smaller critters like pigeons or toads - which comfortably fit into my fridge‘s freezer compartment in their labelled body bags. The one rule for my artistic practice against death blindness is: I am not allowed to overlook and leave behind. I have to take care of any Roadkill I encounter, no matter the inconveniences. This rule led to countless times I arrived to meetings with a rat in my handbag - but the griffon vulture was a different scale of inconvenience. I transported it encased in cat litter and salt, a good mixture against smells of decay and back in Vienna bought a freezer chest for it. I handbuild and sculpt every urn-sculpture out of clay for every individual after I find them. The shape is always inspired by either the animal itself, its habitat or its habits, often including flowers or petals in the design as a gesture of gifts of mourning. Some urns have a lid, some just „hold“ a space for the animal. The greenware gets fired the first time together with the Roadkill in the urn itself. This makes every firing a cremation and allows minerals of the animals‘ bodies to merge with the claybody - a detail later on not visible anymore, but valuable in symbolism to me. After the cremation I meticulously brush out the remaining ashes, sometimes carefully removing bones to place them back right after. Only the smallest bone fragments are swept out to be mixed with the ashes. I grind down the cremains in a mortar and add them to a glaze mixture which is then carefully applied over the remaining bones and the rest of the sculpture. I often layer my different glazes for each piece - but even when I use the same combinations, the results vary largerly, as each animal is a resource of an unique composition of minerals and amount of ash and bones. The ingredient of the cremains leads to unpredictable variants of my glaze recipes. All of these recipes are developed from scratch by myself, valuing symbolic meaning and care again more than aesthetical preferences. I refused to use pigments and designed my glazes with very simple recipes based on bone ash and lepidolith, a half-gemstone which stands for healing. Developing glazes with a focus on textures and poetics instead of attractive colors goes hand in hand with my approach on death blindness and the (non-)aesthetics of Roadkill. After all, my entire practice is based on care - not design.
Sources:
Forman, Richard T. T., and Lauren E. Alexander. 1998. “Roads and Their Major Ecological Effects.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 29 (1): 207–31. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.ecolsys.29.1.207.
Grilo, Clara, Elena Koroleva, Richard Andrášik, Michal Bíl, and Manuela González-Suárez. 2020. “Roadkill Risk and Population Vulnerability in European Birds and Mammals.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 18 (6): 323–28. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2216.
Ladd, Brian. 2008. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. Univ. of Chicago Press.
Mann, Charles C. 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
“What is the zad ?” 2017. Zad for ever, July 13. https://zadforever.blog/about/.