In this article, we aim to explore the connections within a work that opens horizons for staging an eloquent geography, the notion of endings, and how it is possible to make the sensation of extinction tangible. We examine the performative matter of time and how it acts within the causalities interconnected with the presence and absence of humanity. Auf den Feldern der Zeit (In the Fields of Time) by Esteban Sánchez makes the architectures of contemporary thought accessible, bridging art and anthropology while condensing a sensory practice into relational research.
An absent hero sends instructions, like a commander, to a group of researchers in Antarctica. The mission is to photograph a wooden chair on the least populated continent on the planet. The sites chosen for contemplation are the least “Antarctic” of Antarctic places—the locations most capable of evoking the evanescence of geography. The writing of the landscape is permeated by suspension, where everything creaks silently. The green striations of the Antarctic landscapes have made it possible for primordial documents and materials to emerge—an archive that is spontaneous and automatic, constantly growing, not by accumulation but through dispersion. This is how objects maintain a relationship with endings, and Sánchez’s work represents the apex of a mound (from the Latin tumere, “to swell”) that rises from a flat base—just as the flat white layer of the Antarctic horizon becomes aesthetic matter with a motion akin to breathing.
The work is presented through smartphone screens embedded in polystyrene panels. A non-human, gurgling sound emanates from the installation, whispering the words of Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: “When the world ends, there will be no voice-over to comment on the end of the world.” This sense of anxiety settles synthetically into the polystyrene covering the room, creaking and crumbling under visitors’ footsteps. The cracks in the horizon are cell phones that organically occupy the room, connected by cables (like arteries) necessary for power supply. The gaze is drawn to the vanishing line, which materializes in a solitary experience of a collective activity—the researchers’ work—temporary and nomadic.
This is a reflection on time, a cornerstone of Sánchez’s research, and on its performativity. When temporal processes are projected onto a concrete plane, they are closely linked to global coordination. The alignment relies on atomic clocks scattered around the world, strictly connected to the Earth’s rotation. The speed of the Earth’s rotation is not constant and fluctuates; for this reason, semiannual adjustments are necessary to maintain temporal alignment. Since 1972, irregularities in the Earth’s movement have required the addition of 27 leap seconds, but for the first time in recent years, a change has been recorded. Due to polar ice melting, the Earth’s rotation has accelerated, making it necessary not to add but to subtract a leap second. This could create unprecedented problems and therefore unpredictable risks.
The changes induced by humanity—both on the environment and on measurements, and consequently on vital rhythms—open unexpected perspectives. In the work, the stasis and absence of the chair in a place like Antarctica tears open viewpoints connected to an art not only of interaction between artist and executors to achieve a contrivance but of an intense weaving of relationships. This aspect relates to one of the most central theoretical debates of our time: the questioning of humanity’s central position. The work opens windows onto the possibilities of formalizing anthropocentrism and exploring its confrontation with its opposite. The artist, the executor-researchers, and the visitor intersect their plural visions, inevitably converging in hyperobjects. These ramifications can be illuminated by Timothy Morton’s words when he speaks of futurity reinscribed into the present, which ends the metaphysics of presence, forcing us to coexist with a strange future—a future without “us.”
References
Agnew, D.C. 2024. “A Global Timekeeping Problem Postponed by Global Warming.” Nature 628: 333–36. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07170-0.
Danowski, Déborah, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 2017. Is There a World to Come? Essay on the Fears of the End. Translated by Alessandro Lucera and Alessandro Palmieri. Rome: Nottetempo.
Castellucci, Claudia. 2019. “The Aesthetic Question of an Artistic Archive, in its Conception and Use.” Seminar conducted by members of the Laboratorio sull’Archivio of the Societas Raffaello Sanzio, directed by Claudia Castellucci. Cesena, Teatro Comandini.
Morton, Timothy. 2018. Hyperobjects. Translated by Vincenzo Santarcangelo. Milan: Nero.