On this Remembrance Day, I thought I would show you have some of the artifacts of weaponry and warfare can actually be re-imagined as something useful, and dare I say, beautiful. Estonian artist
Mati Karmin and his company MarineMine have taken salvaged cases of WWII era Russian anti-submarine mines and created everything from functioning fireplaces, to tables, armchairs, beds to sculptural pieces like his 'toy' baby carriage (complete with grenades instead of rattles).
These sorts of mines were in fact very common. I know from doing marine fieldwork offshore western Canada that we in this country dumped our own on the seabed (at a time when people never imagined that future generations would do anything at those sorts of depths and the scientists and even fishers to whom these are now a real hazard). The ones
used in these sculptures and furniture were not deployed at sea, but stored in warehouses in full working order, on an island in Gulf of Finland, for decades. The Soviet army finally removed and destroyed the explosives in the early 1990s, leaving the amazing vessels behind. Karmin has seen the beauty in the cases and had the imagination to put them to better use.
His chandelier involves replacing the detonators with Plexiglas mock-ups, serving as light bulbs.
He's even used some of the hemispherical cases to build an
aquarium.
(via Twisted Sifter)
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