The Totemy series is an art project by Alicja Biala, a Amsterdam-based, Polish artist, whose work draws on pagan and folkloric threads of the past to probe the conditions of today and the questions of tomorrow. The Totemy is a physical visualization of statistics and figures related to climate change. The sculptural pieces interrogate the opaque nature of the warnings given to us in numerical forms by bringing disparate statistical elements together in more tangible and relational form. Each physical sculpture is given a digital counterpart where the information that determines the proportions of its form are explained.

You may find Alicja’s totems in Liverpool and Forest of Dean in the UK, Aveiro in Portugal, Poznan in Poland and two here at Seks’s dining room. Both totems are in conversation with each other, and are a visual representation of the carbon footprint of different actions related to romance and sex.

The first totem, next to the counter, shows the carbon footprint of the activities 100 Copenhagen couples might do throughout a romantic day, or those that a single couple might do 100 times over the course of their relationship. Starting from top, the first tile shows 100 trips to Louisiana Museum by train, the second 100 bottles of wine enjoyed together, then 100 loaves of bread eaten together, the smallest one 100 cigarettes (not encouraged), 100 sessions of calories burned during average sexual intercourse, finally the bottom one about 100 shared showers after sex (encouraged).

This totem shows how living locally for romantic 100 days is the equivalent footprint (~600kg of Co2e in emissions) to a round trip flight to Ibiza, showed by the second turquoise totem, putting the romantic decisions of a couple into question when they have collective climate implications.