Lacquered wood supports, pine beam with carving and redrawing of the waters of the wood on one side and Walter Benjamin’s history theses manuscript on the other. 300 x 56,5 x 190,5 cm

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In the present, history and geohistory intersect in an obvious way; human action has a devastating effect on the natural environment. What until recently we called nature and which since the Enlightenment we believed we had to understand, dominate and exploit indefinitely, is systemically rebelling and dragging us into a zone of uncertainty where the ontological parameters suffer a collapse. This installation shows the tension between history (human historical time) and geohistory, which we used to call natural history and today we define, among other terms, as the Anthropocene.

The wooden beam, an architectural object of structural support, is shown on scaffolding that provides another type of physical support. Two different conceptions of time are revealed: on the one hand, the waters of the wood redrawn in pencil on one of the sides suggest the time of the -bios, where the sinuousness of the drawing depends on the atmospheric conditions linked to the tree growth and deployed in a natural time. On the other side of the beam, the hand-copied transcription of Benjamin’s history theses offer, in contrast, the burden of his philosophical thought intensely concentrated on the idea of ​​historical progress. His angel of history would probably also feel fear today for the horrors caused by human action on the environment and its consequences for the future of life on the planet.