Broken Volume is a diptych that plays with the tension between virtual and physical worlds. What began in 2019 as a digital animation took on a tangible form in 2022. Both works explore the same premise: how a sculpture changes when it falls apart into fragments.

In this 3D animation I used a digital model of Auguste Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (1877). The sculpture is divided into different versions of 2, 4, 12, 48, 240, 1,440, and 10,080 fragments. The figure slowly breaks apart; the fragments fall into a defined space on the ground.

The work shows how the volume changes depending on the degree of fragmentation: in two pieces the form remains recognizable, in thousands of pieces it seems to disappear. Because it is virtual, the sculpture remains restorable: in the animation it is gradually rebuilt to its original volume.

Above: The animation is presented as an exhibition concept, with the seven video versions shown side by side, either projected or on large flat screens.

Below: The blue video work shows the sculpture breaking into 240 fragments and then slowly reassembling.

The animation Broken Volume (virtual) from 2019 was the starting point for this work. The idea of carrying out the same process in reality never left me.

So I created a mold of Rodin’s The Age of Bronze in a 3D program. This mold was printed and filled with red-ochre acrylic resin. Once the sculpture came out of the mold and had hardened, I smashed it into pieces with a hammer. The defined space in which the fragments landed was this time not a virtual environment, but a glass cylinder.

The premise is identical to the animation: the pleasure of watching how a volume changes by breaking it, until eventually nothing but dust remains. By presenting the virtual and physical versions together, a dialogue emerges between two worlds — the digital and the tangible.