SUS BONUS

In this project, Sus, pig (in Latin) and Bonus, extra (but also good, honest, and useful) combine in a series of controversial objects: pigs may be both symbols of luck (‘Schwein gehabt’) but they also denote unsavoury behaviour. The pig’s head as a teapot/tea set, but also as a light plays on this dichotomy: while lighting and tea drinking are everyday activities, the pig’s head is a ‘bonus’ or luxury object.

Volokhova first came across this image of the pig’s head while travelling in the Ukranian countryside several years ago. It was lying next to a cut of salo, white bacon, a Ukranian delicacy. The image resurfaced in subsequent trips and Volokhova decided to portray it in porcelain. After purchasing a pig’s head in Germany, she was struck by how different it appeared relative to the Ukranian variants. She later discovered that the living conditions and the average lives of the pigs varied between countries: the Ukranian pigs lived longer and thus the heads she saw exhibited more traces of life than the German pigs.

Sus Bonus, like pig’s heads, and like bacon, expresses the idea of a saturated but growing art and design market driven perhaps more by wants than by needs. On the one hand, we continue to buy thus generating and facilitating creativity. On the other hand, objects and forms grow stale and are put out to pasture (in a manner of speaking) until they too are but cuts and waste to be bought in a market.

The Ukrainian Maidan Revolution ocurred coincindentaly during the development of this project. At this time the SUS BONUS  became one more definition. Created in 2.2014 and 8.2014 this are two particular objects emotional dedicated to the historical evolution in Ukraine.