Acumulaciones de un presente muy pasado [Accumulations of a Very Past Present]. Installation by La Cuarta Piel

Using materials that present different stages of disintegration, the piece reveals new meanings for matter that oscillate between prized amulets and the detritus of our times. Will new caves to explore emerge in the artificial mountains?

We accumulate the things we value and hide what bothers us. But our most precious objects and the things we discard have something in common: they end up forming part of the same process of disintegration.

While waste management is on the verge of collapse —with overflowing rubbish bins and infrastructures already saturated before their planned obsolescence— the solution still being adopted is to move the waste to a place where we can’t see it. Our detritus forms a landscape of artificial mountain ranges that stretch across increasingly vast areas, with new ecosystems and metabolic relations to discover emerging in the depths and surfaces. The margins of cities are filling with mountains that accumulate the things we don't want, while we guard our amulets like magical and sacred objects.

We have created a landscape that will endure for millions of years, even when human beings have ceased to exist. What will the artificial mountains look like in 5,000 years? Will new relics emerge in the strata pertaining to our era? Acumulaciones de un presente muy pasado opens a fissure in which to explore new meanings associated with decomposing matter, creating a sediment out of an amalgam of traces and memories. As we delve into this geological fiction, we experience a meaningful encounter with the different interlacing strata that form a mosaic of time and matter.

La Cuarta Piel is a community of practices that mediates landscapes, knowledge, species and territories. Its designs construct collective situations that translate the processes that sustain human life into cities. The aim is to use enjoyment to build a new sensitivity to familiar ecosystems, reflecting on the ecological relationships of these complex processes to assimilate them with the human scale. Acumulaciones de un presente muy pasado is a project by La Cuarta Piel coordinated by Mon Cano and Ximo Berenguer.

Installation and artist information:

Concept design and direction: Mon Cano and Ximo Berenguer

Production: Íñigo Barrón García, César Fuertes Llorens, Javier Gutiérrez Hernández, Jerome Lorente Martí, Ana Moure Rosende and Carlos Pastor García.

Project developed with the support of Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana and Centro Cultural Las Cigarreras.