The group exhibition Strata Strolling brings together the works of Adriana Bogdanova, Šimon Chovan, Irene de Boer, Adrian Kiss, Diana Scherer, and Aline Schwörer, each of whom envision the fossil remains of the future, yet to be unraveled. The exhibition engages with principles of speculative paleontology and archaeology: like amber preserving the remnants of ancient life, exhibited works absorb microparticles of the present.

The word fossil first appeared in the 16th century, deriving from the Latin fossilis, meaning “dug up”. At that time, it referred broadly to anything obtained from beneath the Earth’s surface: objects, traces, and material forms whose origins were difficult to determine and had not yet been clearly classified as organic or inorganic matter. This meaning persisted until the 19th century, when the term gradually narrowed to what we understand as fossils today, as noted by the geologist M. J. S. Rudwick. Just as its definition shifted in the past, it may do so again in the future, when the remnants of our present become an undifferentiated mass in which composite layers intermingle–a condition that Strata Strolling seeks to envision. Traces of its earlier usage remain in the term fossil fuels, linking its current meaning to the organization of the biosphere and geosphere into planetary systems of production. The principle of extractivism began to escalate with the very establishment of geohistory and the stratification of natural time as a diachronic sequence of layered temporalities. From that time, geological materials–energy resources, metals, chemicals and minerals–are deterritorialized from their original strata and reconstituted within human infrastructures and modes of perception, which the exhibition attempts to unsettle. The selected works are embedded within these transformations–delocalized and viscous configurations of matter that reflect broader shifts in how materiality itself is understood in the age of the Anthropocene.

Artistic approaches share a common logic of making visible already existing forms–preserved forms, organic residues, beeswax, wood, clay, but also manufactured objects and others–which enter into new relationships and contexts. They construct a kind of post-natural museum. In this model, the distinction between natural specimens–material records of the Earth from human-made artifacts dissolves, as artistic practice itself disrupts and rewrites these boundaries. In contrast, the natural history museum represents a modern epistemology based on the categorization of forms and the systematic organization of reality, grounded precisely in such dichotomy that no longer fully holds. Similarly to how geometry attempts to stabilize space and natural structures through abstract systems of measurement and relations, the present works organize matter so that it becomes legible as an artifact to be read.

— Karolína Voleská