Geo-mimicry Collaborative

An initiative of Bruno Latour and Bronislaw Szerszynski.
3 october 2014 - 4 January 2015.
lesabattoirs.org/en/expositions/anthropocene-monument
'60 years ago, plastic was considered as a miraculous substance that Roland Barthes named the ‘stuff of alchemy’. Nowadays, plastic is central in the vivid environmental debate linked to human activity.
The presence of plastics has been confirmed in the most remote and pristine places on Earth, these including the deep-oceans. Plastics are to mark importantly our geological record; the limits between the nature-made and the human-made blur.
My proposal for a monument to the Anthropocene envisions a series of 5 participative devices, figuring 5 miniatures of oceans. Each piece is located in a different coastal city situated on the path of the ocean currents which form the 5 major gyres.
Inspired by the ‘geo-mimicry’ technology (the science that mimics geological processes), the devices offer a metaphor of the geological process of sedimentation that occurs in the ocean. The interactive and transformative dimension aim to provoke debate and question the potential of this new synthetic matter.
Through a ritualistic act, the audience is invited to become maker of its own monument.
Rather than witnessing past facts, this monuments witness the present time and its plausible future in order to raise awareness.
The project stresses the concept of ultimate destruction caused by human activity with a long term co-creation with nature.'