Our human time means nothing

Tytus Szabelsky-Różniak documents unintentional monuments that seem to unwittingly inhabit the civilized landscape in a dense network of communication lines or points of giant logistics centers. For the SEFO 2024 Triennial he updates his projects Divide and Connect and AMZN. The giant linear cut into the surface of the Eurasian continent in the form of the Druzhba pipeline passes by the truly monumental objects of the prefabricated halls of economically powerful companies. The very monumentality representing power and capital gives rise to the monument of our time. A legacy of the future that we did not plan for? After all, Szabelski’s Capital series already found new monuments in the former Eastern Bloc rather than in the traditional sense of the word in the development of the newly consolidated economic system of the policies of consumption Europe.

And now we step aside and, thanks to the project of Nela Vicanová, we will see our time and its monuments from a different perspective. The human time that we are able to perceive as the time line of everyone’s life is roughly one hundred years. In the context of geological processes, our human time means nothing. Yet we have been drastically affecting it for roughly a hundred years. With the equipment of an architect, the author uncovers through probes and axonometric sections the memory of places with terminated mining activity and brings to the surface, in a theoretical construct, the grid through which we glimpse geological time. We have managed to rake it in such a way that the churches sink tens of meters and tilt sideways as a memento. The landscape around changes with successive stages into a new wilderness. So we have an image of the future appearance of the new monuments.