The Time Engine: A Decade is a Heartbeat, An Interview with Adrián Villar Rojas
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Installation view of Adrián Villar Rojas ‘Mi familia muerta’ (My dead family) 2009 at Ushuaia´s End of The World Biennial, 2nd Edition. Photo © Adrián Villar Rojas
The Time Engine: A Decade is a Heartbeat
Remembering my interview with
Adrián Villar Rojas
In 2012 I found myself in Buenos Aires, Argentina, interviewing the now internationally acclaimed artist Adrián Villar Rojas. I asked him about ‘My Dead Family’, an installation exhibited in the Biennale of the End of the World held in Ushuaia, Argentina in 2009. At the time of our interview the twenty-seven-metre long whale had remained in the Yatana forest for three years, and Villar Rojas told me:
““Recently I received an email saying that they will have to tear the thing down since it’s been ruined and destroyed. It was basically left to die, to decompose as a victim of that other sculptural force that is nature.” ”
Installation view of Adrián Villar Rojas ‘Mi familia muerta’ (My dead family) 2009 at Ushuaia´s End of The World Biennial, 2nd Edition. Photo © Adrián Villar Rojas
A decade later, ‘The End of Imagination’ was commissioned to inaugurate the opening of the Tank, as part of the Sydney Modern expansion of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in my hometown of Sydney. For this work Villar Rojas and his team created modelling software designed to simulate the effects of virtual environments on sculptural objects over time. They called this software the Time Engine, and the 3D models it generated became the blueprint for the haunting structures of ‘The End of Imagination’. In these objects we can observe “that other sculptural force that is nature” accelerated. Ten years had passed, but these artificial ruins were both brand new and ancient.
For the site-specific installation Villar Rojas first visited the Tank in 2018 while it was still partly flooded. He describes this visit:
““The space was raw, damp, cold and with a profound echo and reverberation. We used hand-held torches to explore, creating incredible shadows as our lights hit over a hundred columns. It reminded me of being in a pitch-black forest, where forms and shapes only become visible within the single, moving light source of a torch. It was magic*.” ”
Upon entering the Tank in 2023 a decade felt like a heartbeat. As a faded memory of a whale corpse beached in a forest in Argentina became linked, almost magically, to a subterranean man-made forest in Australia. While clearly separated by time-space, these places were now connected, but only in my memory. This is part of the poetry of Villar Rojas’ work. Temporalities collide, as a confusing world of associations both cultural and personal bind together. The melancholy and wonder of Villar Rojas’ work reside here. Human memory is a chaotic cabinet of curiosities, fallible, sentimental and of course hopelessly impermanent.
When I asked Villar Rojas “how would you describe what it is that you do?” he replied:
““I build monuments because I’m not ready to lose anything.””
Installation view of Adrián Villar Rojas 'The End of Imagination' 2022 in the Tank at the Art Gallery of New South Wales © Adrián Villar Rojas, photo © Jörg Baumann
As lifeless as these objects may appear, they pulse with emotion. Constructed of endless organic and inorganic materials including metals, plastics, concrete, glass, salt, wax, resin and wood, they resemble debris piles woven of infinite and seemingly unconnected pieces. Perhaps drugged up from the sea or adrift in space, but certainly out of place, even lost. I recall Villar Rojas saying in an interview all those years ago:
““I’d like emotional flesh in my work. Enough with cool form! I’d like to show each square centimetre of sadness, developed in a world woven out of infinite and exasperated relations**.””
While cast in an almost chiaroscuro light, these structures appear to take one form, but reveal something unexpected when illuminated. The roving lights that flock together with audible synchronicity feel anthropomorphic. Programmed machines perhaps or bioluminescent sea creatures, they are adorably animated and quietly menacing. As if they both see and give sight.
However, in the darkness of the Tank their presence is welcome. In their absence we are left squinting and projecting onto these enormous objects, what we think we see. What looks like oxidised steel in the half light, appears more like a once thriving bee hive when lit. The metamorphic rock stacked upon black magma bound together by some unknown tectonic force, when illuminated appears man-made. Sedimentary and crystalline rock glisten like dewy flesh, upon which tangled cables appear carnal, like arteries. Fossilised invertebrates evoke fear and curiosity in equal measure. In the half light one wonders, are these terrestrial creatures? A bird's nest made of steel reminds us of nature's prevailing ingenuity and mushrooms bloom throughout. Amongst the ruins signs of life persist.
Installation view of Adrián Villar Rojas 'The End of Imagination' 2022 in the Tank at the Art Gallery of New South Wales © Adrián Villar Rojas, photo © Jörg Baumann
In ‘The End of Imagination’ symbols traditionally associated with enduring dualities like past and present, natural and artificial, or life and death are enmeshed into allusive heaps. The mushroom brings our attention to another duality. Villar Rojas’ work is characterised by monumental scale, so the tiny mushrooms held my attention. The now famous biologist Paul Stamets says that “fungi are the interface organisms between life and death***.” Through literal enmeshment mushrooms recycle death into life. Almost like magic, a precious alchemy exists in which life remerges, but always in connection to what came before. An eternal symbiosis, an inescapable ecology of seemingly infinite and unconnected relations. Upon seeing the ‘The End of Imagination’ I felt that melancholy of Villar Rojas' work. I was older and my future requiem echoed in time-space a little louder, but for nature a decade is a heartbeat.
Adrián Villar Rojas, 2013 Photo © Doris Kessler
This article was written by Nauti Sailor Sabrina Sokalik, at Nauti Studios Sydney.
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Notes:
*Paton, J.P. (2022) Every Sculpture is Many Sculptures, Art Gallery of NSW. Available at: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/art/watch-listen-read/read/every-sculpture-is-many-sculptures/ (Accessed: 05 May 2023).
**Filipovic, E. (2010) Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture. Phaidon.
***Stamets, P. (2005) Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Ten Speed Press.
