“Becoming a Fossil” is a work about planetary storytelling, the tools we use (both ancient and modern) for reconstructing the Earth’s past, and how bodies hold memory like archives of trauma and recovery. The project also responds to the current traumas of the Anthropocene, where theorist Heather Davies has described pervasive plastic pollution as a form of Earth’s “metabolic indigestion,” where the natural and no longer be disentangled from the synthetic.
For decades, Prof. Peter Frenzel of the Jena University Institute of Geosciences compares the cross-sectioning of a long rock core sample to reading a book dated 290 million years ago. According to West Africa’s Dagara cosmology, stones are believed to hold the stories of Earth’s changes and thus transmit wisdom and collective memory. In the artist’s own research into healing modalities, the human body, like the planetary body, is an archive of stored memory and trauma, where matter stays fatefully bound by the same wound. With today’s turmoil of climate emergencies, capitalist extraction, and collective psycho-social anxieties, what will be archived from our current state of transformation? In the aerial performance, situated in an entangled web of scavenged trash, the choreography illustrates our own bodies navigating our current collapse, dipping in and out of uncertainty, panic, and comfortability with falling. Our bodies store all the emotions of a land that cannot metabolize its own waste. “Becoming a Fossil” illustrates another survival story, sitting in rock, waiting to be read millions of years later.
Produced through the Kuenstlerische Tatsachen Art-Science Residency
Scientific Collaborators: Prof Peter Frenzel and Olga Gildeeva Schmitz from the Jena Institute of Geosciences
Production: Vincent Mauer
Facilitation: Enrique Torres and Yul Koh
Installation Assistance: Philip Pastrik
Videographer: Christian Kuttke
Photography: Alexandra Ivanciu
With generous core sample donations and fossil loans from the Geologisches Probenarchiv Thüringen, Jena Institute of Geosciences and the Bromacker Lab
