Artwork: Adrian Villar Rojas, Poems for Earthlings, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, 2019
What will remain after the end of humanity, the end of art? What would be the last piece of art made by a human before we disappear from earth?
These deeply unsettling questions are at the heart of Argentinian artist Adrian Villar Rojas’s work.
Rojas’s art blurs fact with fiction, delving into ideas of multiple-universes, alternative evolutionary narratives, alien perspectives, the Anthropocene, and the interrogation of art as commodity, of its questionable endurance into perpetuity through its preservation in art museums. His installations are site-specific and transient, many of the objects destined to be destroyed or to disintegrate. His practice leaves little trace of his projects around the globe, yet each installation is linked by the overarching question of art and its relevance in a civilsation that could end.
Artwork: Adrian Villar Rojas, The Murderer of Your Heritage, Arsenale, Venice, 2011
His most recent site-specific project at the Oude Kerk (Old Church)—recognised as the oldest building and parish church in Amsterdam, located in the Wallen, or Red Light District—titled Poems for Earthlings builds on these ideas and two previous projects from 2011.
Rojas’s installation at the Venice Biennale in 2011 was titled, The Murderer of Your Heritage. Constructed at the Artigliere in the Arsenale, huge sculptures made of clay over a framework of cement, burlap and wood, dwarfed the viewer in a tight and dramatically lit arrangement. These strange hybrid creatures, part machine, plant and fictional, were either from some other planet, or maybe they’re the future inhabitants of Earth. This colossal endeavour was taken further in a site-specific sculpture in the Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. Also titled Poems for Earthlings, the telescopic column seemed at once recognisable and otherworldly, a ruin perhaps of a future civilisation. An alien civilisation? This time-travel, time-looped sculpture was eventually destroyed after its one-month showing.
Artwork: Adrian Villar Rojas, Poems for Earthlings, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, 2011
The sandbagged and heaped mounds at the Oude Kerk imply a bulwark against threat; a construction of primitive temples or burial sites; of temporary refuge and again, as in so many other works, the futility of preserving our human built environments and artworks indefinitely against the natural incursions of a world in crisis.