IKHNOS
PROBABILITY OF FUTURE ARCHEOLOGY
In biology, Ichnofossils present the remains of deposits, imprints, eggs, nests, bioerosion or any other type of impression. They make visible the results of the activity of organisms in connection with their specific environment.
Today, our plastic footprint on nature is such that we can easily imagine the remains of our civilization that the archaeologists of the future will discover through sedimentary rocks.
A stratigraphy of our soils after climate change and rising water levels could indeed reveal a completely different category of fossil attesting to the decline of our civilization. These “remains” could reveal the polluted ruins of our artificial and rot-proof production and the residues of our industrial activity in the era of carbon energies. They prove our inability to recycle, to digest a material unnatural, whose usefulness and use has been relatively short compared to the durability of its toxicity in our ecosystem.
It seems urgent to initiate a reflection in our contemporary societies, on the production, use and the value given to materials that vary according to their origin. It goes without saying that instinctively we give more value to stones, pebbles, wood from nature and worked by man, even if they present irregularities or defects, than those designed in an industrial way by the machine like the concrete or plastic, smooth and homogeneous. The romantic fascination that we have for the ruins of an old building made of stone and wood worked by hand has no equivalent in the concrete or plasticized ruins of a megalopolis. contemporary relegated to rubble. The first are borrowed from the gesture of man, the second from the machine and therefore reduced to the state of means with a view to an end without intrinsic beauty. The industrial materials with which our planet is covered cannot decompose by itself, nor serve as new ones, and become ghostly and deadly icons, homogeneous and stable, a copy of a beauty far removed from Beauty in the universal sense of the term according to Kant. .
In this travertine work, an old coping that has become rubble, the rock regains a certain freedom in its functionality and acquires a new form of beauty. It merges with plastic packaging castings cast in concrete, and became emblematic of a major crisis. The textures, smooth, rough, grainy, polished, oppose and respond to each other through a formal multiplicity. The perfection of the molding and the fineness of the grain of the concrete create a certain stability in this apparent chaos of jagged rocks. The eye searches, wonders, goes from a state of appeasement to a more wandering movement. These volumes challenge us and force us to reflect on our consumption, our relationship to natural matter, its use, our industrial and polluting production; everything makes sense towards more responsibility. Presented grouped, these modules send us back to the futuristic image of a megalopolis in the Anthropocene era. Ikhnos appears as a trace of our slow decline, the agony of a misguided humanity. She reveals what we have made without being projected, and shows what we no longer want without being able to
undo it. Ikhnos turns into a city, not without value but with negative added value. The work becomes the sign of our break with Nature as an active power - called by Spinoza in The Ethics, Natura Naturans in opposition to Natura Naturata, created and passive nature - and refers to the debt to be paid to the land.
Karinka Szabo-Detchart