Rock Strangers are strange objects popping up where you least expect them and having a huge effect on the urban and architectural context of the environment. Rock Strangers generate the sentiment of estrangement because of their electric orange colour. At the same time however, they evoke the primal emotions of curiosity and astonishment of man.
Arne Quinze: “A lot of cities around the globe look the same although they are located on different continents. You can still find identical buildings or the same streets. One can no longer detect any differences, people put up concrete walls around them. Building large-scaled installations makes people feel small as a human being. I hope that they start asking questions about what their function on this planet is. With my monumental sculptures I seek confrontation with my audience. I regard my work as a study about how I experience life and how people in general experience their lives.”
People tend to seek a safe environment, a cocoon eliminating the unexpectable. Arne Quinze is especially interested in the human relations and interactions, how life and society are organized. Not only do people put up walls around them for protection, but they also want to create a certain distance between themselves and others. People need these axioms in order to feel good.
The artist used his imagination round these findings in order to put the idea of an alien element in the city. What would happen if we detected a strange element in our habitual urban environment all of the sudden? How do we react to unusual objects if we are confronted with them in our daily lives? Who or what remains the stranger, the person confronted with it or the object itself?
Rocks Strangers stimulate openness and bring different views and groups in society to the forefront. Quinze’s public installations redefine social space as a context of maximum porosity, flexible, and facilitating experiential flows of diverse nature which provide alternative models of interaction. Because of this intense orange-red colour the sculptures contrast with their natural surroundings. The red-orange colour has a myriad of meanings, in nature it can attract or repulse at the same time. It is the colour of the blood that symbolizes death or life. It may not be a natural colour but when seeing it people are completely absorbed by it, again introducing possible reactions of people.
