Collaboration - Post-world Undercover Guerrilla Fake Rock Manufacturing Facility

 

 

Is it the end or the beginning of the world? Does it even matter? In his makeshift undercover fake-rock manufacturing plant installation, Sebastian Moldovan does away with evidence of historical linearities and instead subtracts from our reality just enough recognizable details of an alternative society rebuilding the now, one hollow rock at a time. The installation is made in collaboration with artists Lucia Ghegu and Albert Kaan, adding works that inhabit the space, building a collective approach beyond the authorial. We are now in the post-sublime nature, in its perfect simulacrum, reality anew.

A lost or emergent civilisation is busy with producing and reproducing the archives of our worlds combined - boulders, rocks, stones. Shaped by cultural beliefs and human hands in the idealized forms of building blocks, stones are resistant to the many histories humans have tried to encapsulate in them - the theological technological. Rocks/sand/glass/plants, organized and reorganized into matter in a cycle of slow deterioration, of permanent stabilization or rapid disappearance.

This a mineral language, before symbolic characters, before cursed rosetta stones of mistranslations. Isn't it better that nuclear facilities use only visual warnings? We are translating in deep time, where and when language is just a temporary spike, civilizations running fast through the streams, only radiation remaining iminent.

We are surrounded by manifestos, since the artworld above all worlds delights in indulging in fake rocks with exchanged meanings. But it also gives us the chance of a place beyond all meanings, entanglements of an in-situ we might just as well dream together. We gathered detritus of everyday life bits and memorabilia, internet cables and lost loved artefacts, mashed up together in the wonders of plastiglomerates. And then there is this quiet anger in these hollow rocks, how did we already end up in a nature-tamed greenhouse, changing the composition of our oceans, collecting dead reefs, building islands and shelters, throwing the proverbial stones and sticks?

As urban growth continues to explode, creating downward spirals instead of streamlined utopic dreams, one can ask what will be left from these cavernous buildings or future fossils? And what kind of pillars will hold whatever comes next? Between techno-solutionism and dystopian scripts there might be plenty of other narratives still to build, and tools out there, in the grassroots of our outposts, with water and paper.

(text by Cristina Stoenescu and Edith Lázár for the biennial catalogue)

The 5th edition of the Art Encounters Biennial My Rhino is not a Myth

Curatorial Team: Cristina Bută, Monica Dănilă, Edith Lázár, Ann Mbuti, Adrian Notz, Cristina Stoenescu, Georgia Țidorescu

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