STOCKHOLM.- In the town of Sundbyberg outside of Stockholm, locals can now gather around Bigert & Bergström’s new social sculpture, BBQ Meteorite. Behind a housing complex, a meteorite in cast iron has struck down. Inspired by the Youndegin meteorite found in Western Australia in 1884, the heat-resistant sculpture thrones three meters above the ground, standing in a crater that inhabitants can use as a grill to cook BBQ or a campfire to congregate.

From creation to destruction, the flames from the inviting grill-crater tell several stories. Meteorites have been vital both to the birth of life and mass extinctions. The climate changes that erupted when the Chicxulub meteorite hit the Yucatán Peninsula 66 million years ago resulted in the extinction of three-quarters of the earth’s population, most conspicuously the end of non-avian dinosaurs—an event that prepares the stage for mammals and ultimately human life. Social activity, humor, menace, and contemplation are leitmotifs in the Swedish artist duo’s public social sculptures. Whether it is climate change or nuclear catastrophes, this time, the focal point is outer space.




While the religious verdicts and mythological cult meanings of celestial bodies such as comets and meteorites represent the forces of destruction, creation, or epitaphic experience of deity, the meteorite, for modern man as so much else, becomes an object of exploitation.

Around the globe, there are meteorite hunters that look for fallen valuable space objects for a living. However, the hunt for rare minerals and metals doesn’t stop with these space cowboys. Because of resource depletion on earth, extracting elements from asteroids by space mining has become more than just an idea of science fiction. In 2022, NASAs succeeded in their Dart mission project, the first planetary space defense technology to move an asteroid in space. With his SpaceX project, Elon Musk plans to colonize Mars. Human control and exploitation of nature do not cease with the earth but are now beyond this world.

Although space objects have lost their mythological power, they are still real existential threats to life on Earth. The fallen meteorite and burning crater of BBQ Meteorite becomes a visual symbol of the God-like homo Oeconomicu’s failure to control and predict the natural forces of outer space.