#cementconcrete
#envhum
#rogue
#xenotaph
#PCBnANo hay tal cosa como un lapsus inocente. Ecoplanet™ y el nuevo suelo del mundo —en la superficie de una hoja—
Escuela de Arte y Patrimonio, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina
24/sept/2025
Lecture
III Congreso Arte+Ciencia: Tierras
Displacements, rearrangements, and accumulations of matter feed back into one another and accelerate. Bryophyte plants, anchored to tree leaves dusted with cement, thicken into a new rock-like crust, even incorporating tiny animals, assembling living and non-living bodies. Each of these new self-accelerating leaf-cement-moss substrates serves as a miniature model of a planetary dispute over the Earth’s surface, and as an entry point into a hyperprocess crossing human spatial and temporal scales —yet whose extremely slow unfolding may be known at high speed. It is revealed, for example, in cementing weeping fig leaves, in industrial leaks, in the overturning balance between biomass and concrete mass across the planet’s surface —by this year, concrete and its aggregates alone will have surpassed the total biomass of the biosphere (Elhacham et al., 2020)—, and also in the commercial name of Holcim’s Ecoplanet™ cement, in which —as if the product of a freudian slip— there is an underlying desire for a planetary project: “the confrontation between life from millions of years ago and contemporary life, configured as a layer composed of the bodies of ancient marine fauna, deposited on the seabed and compacted at depth, before their necromass was lifted in the form of limestone by tectonic forces, brought within surface reach, exhumed, pulverized, clinkerized and dispersed, reburied as foundations, eroded and settled once again upon the Earth, prefiguring a new layer of alkaline soil, until they repopulated the surface of the planet, not alive”, but life-like.