Paisajes Antropocénicos

Soil is everything. As a record of telluric memory, it is not only soil itself, but simultaneously everything: organic material, fossils and minerals; living creatures and decomposition; bacteria, nutrients, toxins... It is also drought, wetlands, earthquakes, erosion. Soil is construction and demolition, extraction and transformation. And after that, when it is abandoned, the soil returns docile to the territory, freezing time inside it, melting, adding a new layer to the portrait it forms with it.

To speak of the Anthropocene is to speak of time, it is to speak of the geological era in which the human species has become the main force determining the habitability of the earth. A transformation on a geological scale of the soil, of the territory, irreversible. Ecosystems developed over millions of years are now crumbling under our feet.

But is it only our presence as a race or rather a voluntary short-sightedness beyond the quaternary years? Ideas of progress and growth set our pace with promises of unlimited profit, accumulation and development. On a finite planet, endless growth is an illusion only possible if we look only to the immediate future.

In this accelerated pace, this continuous building upwards, we forget to be present, to look at the ground beneath our feet. Trodden, modified, eroded and, all too often, irreversibly ruined territories become our everyday life, our new reality. This is a selective forgetting that privileges one time over another, one species over another, one order over another.

The soil is a record of geological history, it is memory and time. To reveal the traces we have left in it is an act of protest, it is to reveal what has remained hidden, to reveal our past.

But it is also to rediscover its capacity to cultivate futures, to put the present in crisis, to remind us that we live in a complex, conflictive and at the same time exciting reality, and that it is in the memory of these same traces that we can find the hope of more encouraging futures.

Precariousness, absolute vulnerability in the face of the other(s), is the condition of our time. And the ground can be read in this same light. The indeterminate distances itself from teleology, makes life possible, shows us that changing with circumstances is the only way to survive, to move forward.

In recent years, our own capacity for survival has been put in crisis, it has made us question what was unthinkable until then. A liberation that allows us to imagine other possible futures.

Paisajes antropocénicos constructs an unstable and brittle soil as a metaphor for this fragile present, a soil that makes us recognise the past in order to imagine these other futures. It is an act of collective transformation of the ground, an act of resistance against time zero. It is not a frozen object, it is a living installation that unfolds in time - activated by the visitor; vulnerable to rain, sun, wind - that invites us to remain in it, to interact with it; that makes us participants in its own becoming.

It is a reflection on the consequences of every action, of every step. It confronts us with the impossibility of return so that we can think about the multiple possibilities for the future from the recognition of the absolute fragility of our present.

Paisajes antropocénicos is an a priori imperceptible installation. A ground that under its static and robust appearance reveals itself to be delicate and fragile and in which each action makes a reaction visible, becoming a collective game where each break is the cause of new alterations with no turning back. A soil that is apparently unaltered and neutral but that accumulates underneath itself the memory of its own past. 

A ground that registers our footprints to end up revealing the traces drilled in its past. A palimpsest that becomes a space for play and reflection that will inevitably crumble to become soil again, to become everything again: organic matter, fossils, minerals; living creatures and decomposition; bacteria, nutrients, toxins; construction and demolition, extraction and transformation. To be the time and memory of an experimental pavilion that can only be described in retrospect.

Project Team:

Palma: Ilse Cárdenas, Regina de Hoyos, Diego Escamilla, Diego Gallegos, Josué Granados, Jorge Mañas

Vapaa Collective: Iines Karkulahti, Charlotte Nyholm, Meri Wiikinkoski

Model: Tonatiuh Armenta