A Crack in Deep Time – Zeitriss
A future archeological landscape in a site in transition
From the perspective of deep time – geological time – Chemnitz was once located on the equator. Some 291 million years ago, in the Early Permian Period, an eruption of the Zeisigwald volcano flattened the surrounding forest. The trees were covered in hot tephra, which along with the silicic acid it contained triggered the fossilization of the Permian plants, preserving them to this day in a petrified state. The remains of the petrified trees scattered across the region form a local treasure that has been uncovered by centuries of scientific research and excavation. They are now held at the Natural History Museum,, TIETZ both an archive of the planet’s past and an encounter with its possible future.
Today we live in what is commonly called the Anthropocene Epoch, when human society has so profoundly affected the planet that we have become, quite literally, a force of nature. Keeping this in mind, the project A Crack in Deep Time invites viewers to consider not only the adaptability and resilience of life on earth, but also the human contribution to the sixth mass extinction at a time of perceptible climate change. The environmental crises the world faces today are causing us to reconsider our attitude to nature; increasingly, we view ourselves not as owners of the natural world but its caretakers. And as caretakers, we are working towards a less exploitative and more egalitarian relationship with nature. Visitors to the project A Crack in Deep Time encounter petrified logs from the fossil forest that have been embedded in a landscape of plants known as “living fossils”: descendants of the forest from millions of years ago which were able to adapt and are still thriving today. The project thus stages a meeting of two times: the remote past and the present day, marked by a warming climate and new living conditions, to which the natural world is adapting.
Location
Chemnitz, Germany
Area
2000 m2
Year
2024
Client
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz - Stat Chemnitz
Team
Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg
Project by
OOZE (Eva Pfannes, Sylvain Hartenberg) and Marjetica Potrč
Event
NEW ECOLOGIES 2024 , Chemnitz
Curator
Florian Matzner , Anja Richter, Sandy Becker
Commissioner
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz for NEW ECOLOGIES 2024
Support
Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz
/Stadt Chemnitz
/ Museum für Naturkunde, The TIETZ (Ilja Kogan and Ronny Rössler)
/ Hansa Real Estate, Leipzig (Herr Voges)
/ Alugla, Neukirchen (Moritz Trommler)
/ CGS-Creative Garden Sachsen, Chemnitz (Herr Vogel)
Photography
Hanna Pfannes, OOZE team
Status
Completed
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