The Lurking Future

This talk was given by Joshua Groß on August 4, 2024, at the opening of the Planetary Intimacies exhibition at Kunstverein Wolfenbüttel.

I’m trying to attune us to what we are engaging with in this exhibition—and to what we’ll do after my speech. Each of us, individually; yet, I believe there’s a collective dimension that touches us all. We will try to respond to something uncertain. With the assumption that we owe something to this uncertainty: engagement. This assumption is reflected in the artistic approach of Planetary Intimacies. To respond to the unknown, we need a sense of what is unfolding within us.

Filling a time capsule means thinking about what we might be asked one day. It also involves reflecting on where we are right now, examining our assumptions and our knowledge about the surroundings and distances in which we find ourselves. 

The artist of this exhibition, Planetary Intimacies, invites us to gather around different types of fractures and to practice attentiveness toward our own fragility. The most tangible fracture can be seen in the large frottage in the back room, created on a glacial crevasse. Standing in front of the image and looking deeply down into the glacier. A fracture always poses the question of the abyss—from which it emerged or which it creates in turn. Sometimes, as we approach an abyss, we feel we're getting closer to the answers.

‍Let’s try to approach some of these abysses. But answers that touch the existential can only be pre-answers, because the existential never stops transforming and readjusting its questions. Certainties are rare if we understand thinking as continuous thinking and perceiving as continuous perceiving. 

Owning the Fractures. To claim the fractures as your own; to surrender to them; to become fractured yourself; to recognize what has been broken in you; to fall into a crevasse, wondering what is really happening; to feel an opening that surrounds us, inviting us in turn to open ourselves.

How does the future reveal itself? Why has the given become dysfunctional? I said that a fracture raises the question of the abyss. But in the case of the melting glaciers, it's the abysses that are disappearing - at least physically. So instead of 'fracture', let's try 'threshold' for a while. That's grotesque. We've created a threshold that's been spreading around us for some time now. But thresholds aren't supposed to spread; they're supposed to allow a transition. This creates a conflict. We know that Heiner Müller once said: "I believe in conflict. I don't believe in anything else." That might be a good attitude for a playwright to have. But it’s unsettling when, as a human being, you stand facing a world that’s tearing open – in conflict.

The conflict is that we have robbed the geological of its privilege. And it is nagging at us. It has always been the privilege of the geological to exist in its own vast time scales - from our perspective: glaciers over thousands of years, mountains over tens of thousands of years, continents over millions of years. Now we wonder because these privileges have gone mad. We make the privileges of the geological porous.

We live in a time when geological scales are no longer the privilege of the geological. I repeat this strange statement because I believe that the artistic thinking of Planetary Intimacies is deeply affected and illuminated by it.

How does human intervention interfere with the privileges of the geological?
For example, with our life expectancy of about eighty years, we create materials that exist on geological time scales. At the same time, we condemn geological processes to adapt to human time scales. These, let's say, opposite perversions challenge our imagination to the extreme. Our perceptions of time and humanity are shifting. But how?

Let’s think about nuclear waste. The nuclear waste we have produced in the last 80 years will not decay for millions of years; it will remain deadly for millions of years. That much is certain. That is why we face serious challenges with so-called final disposal. Suddenly, we are forced to send messages to future generations. We need to develop time capsules.

We want to warn them - about us and about themselves.

Swiss authorities once considered burying nuclear waste in the granite of the Alps. But geological studies soon made it clear that the mountains "are still growing and the slopes [...] won't remain stable for hundreds of thousands of years.” Suddenly we are faced with the realisation that nuclear waste is more stable than the Alps. If we are planning to hide something unwelcome, never to be seen again – the Alps offer no natural refuge for our hubris. And even if we find geologically stable sites, it is likely that future generations will eventually stumble upon what we've tried to bury.

In the United States, plans for nuclear waste disposal once included Yucca Mountain, a ridge in the Nevada desert. The idea was to develop a warning sign that would still be "effective" in ten thousand years. Based on what we know of human history, we can say with relative certainty that in ten thousand years almost nothing that seems indispensable to us today will be around. Again, we are approaching the dysfunction of the given: The United States will no longer exist, nor will Switzerland or Germany - and, of course, their languages will no longer be spoken. The task is to create a time capsule to warn future people. But how do we communicate when we know that our concept of the world will cease to exist?

It's quite simple. One day the people of the future will ask: What is this? They'll find the warning sign. And the answer should be: Stay away! Danger!We create fractures – not only physically, by burying nuclear waste, but also in time. You could say we're suspending time, because nuclear waste will be just as toxic ten thousand years from now as it is today. We are almost abandoning time, or at least dramatically slowing it down (in human perception of time). There have been both artistic and scientific proposals on how to warn future generations.

Let me mention my favourite: Artists have proposed planting genetically modified cacti over the nuclear waste in the desert, which emit an eerie blue glow. But will our descendants be repelled or attracted by these glowing blue cacti? I'm pretty sure I would be attracted. The thought of driving through a desert at night, surrounded by blue glowing cacti, seems incredibly beautiful to me. 

When we try to communicate to the future, it's quite possible that we create mysteries. And mysteries spark curiosity. It's not easy to relate to something so distant and unimaginable, even when the task is clear. The variables and permutations are beyond what we can predict.

But these perversions don't just affect the future; they haunt us in the present. And although we are aware of these hauntings, they often seem just as mysterious.

As we produce the horrors of the future, the time horizons of glaciers are collapsing as the threshold spreads around us. We are all, to some extent, aware of this. Yet, we remain paralyzed by the dysfunctionality of the present. We aren’t able to think of the present and its dysfunctionality at once. Our concepts of stability are starting to fracture.

Here we are at an exhibition in 2024, knowing that the Alps will be glacier-free by 2100. What has taken millennia to form will collapse in a human lifetime or two.

The obvious question is: Why are we doing this? Why are we letting it happen?The privilege of the geological is gone. We exist on a threshold, causing a transformation, on a terrain that is changing faster than we can process it. When confronted with this, we react with rejection, with revulsion, with unending grief, with shock. We react almost without words, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the change, with intense, absolute feelings, almost with resentment. The psychologist Cynthia Fleury observes: "Resentment prevents opening, it closes, it forecloses: no escape is possible. The subject is perhaps outside of himself, but in himself, eating away at the self, and as such eating away at the only mediation possible with the world." This is not what we want. We don't want to withdraw emotionally. We are here to mediate with the world.

Filling the time capsule confronts us with our own capacity to express ourselves. We recognize us in a passage by the poet Osip Mandelstam, who wrote: "Over my head and over the head of many of my contemporaries there hangs congenital tongue-tie. We were not taught to speak but to babble – and only by listening to the swelling noise of the age and bleached by the foam on the crest of its wave did we acquire a language."

The mediation of the world. As we move through this exhibition, engaging with the works, immersing ourselves in the layers, colours, themes and connotations, I think we can't help but feel the swelling noise of time. I find it powerful when we encounter art that shows us that it's not just about solutions or logic, but also about affects, about deep perception, about refining anticipation, connection, intimacy; about opening ourselves to the existential, experiencing it in as many facets as possible. It's striking and exciting to encounter art that doesn't babble, that has stopped babbling, or that strives to overcome it - art that strives for precision without rejecting the poetic.

And as we move between these works, between melting ice blocks, satellite images and inner landscapes, it will help us to babble less, to allow ourselves a different kind of sincerity, a more precise honesty. This can help us to become more aware of where we stand and who we are, so that we can begin to understand the dysfunctionality of what we take for granted, and release some of the rigidity within us. We tend to take what is given as fact, as certainty. But the future is always lurking in these assumed facts. The philosopher Marcus Steinweg says: „The future is something that rips a hole in the texture of facts. As a tear in the factual fabric, it is present through time. Contemporary art is art that commits itself to this ripping instead of to its universally accepted denial.“ This resonates deeply with the exhibition of Planetary Intimacies. His art asks us to entrust ourselves to this ripping, to learn to perceive the noise of time, to feel its resonance and its effect on us – to stop babbling and instead help this expanding threshold to serve as a passageway for us.