This website forms the ongoing archive of Deep Time Agency and is always under construction.
Deep Time Agency is an artistic research initiative that recontextualizes archaeological and paleontological objects in industrially changed landscapes. By highlighting objects exposed by industrial excavations, we seek to develop a sense of belonging in the disrupted landscapes themselves and in the Anthropocene era.
Alexander von Humboldt - Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen. Tübingen 1807, reimaginedas quarry.
ABOUT
In 2020, visual artists Miriam Sentler (1994, DE/NL) and Wouter Osterholt (NL/DE, 1979, NL/DE) set up an interdisciplinary research initiative: Deep Time Agency. DTA is designed as a multi-year research project that recontextualizes archaeological objects in industrially changed landscapes, in collaboration with local residents, stakeholders and institutions. The initiative merges different historical time layers of places to form a material voice for the present and future of the disrupted landscapes, working in an activist and poetic manner with the symbolics of the objects. By highlighting objects exposed by industrial excavations, we seek to develop a sense of belonging in the disrupted landscapes themselves and on a larger scale in the Anthropocene era.
Why? Industrial landscapes are often completely transformed after resources are mined, developing them into new “natural areas”, wherein all traces and scars of the past are erased. This is often based on the desire to 'return' the used landscapes, thereby creating new recreational areas. Due to prevailing archiving methods, the archaeological objects found during the industrial process are often placed in national collections, and thus no longer maintain any relationship with the landscape where they were found. Local inhabitants lose their houses, nature and local culture, causing what Bruno Latour coins “groundlessness”. This in turn forms the origins of what ecosopher Glenn Albrecht named “solastalgia”.
How? It is our mission to bring back a form of memory to the “erased” landscapes by temporarily relocating the archaeological objects on their original finding locations. This results in absurd and poetic installations and performances, whereby objects are relocated in the air (Ancestors Rising 2022) or underwater (Descent into the Future 2020). By doing so, we expose the thorough changing of the original landscape and merge different historical layers. In our project, the archaeological objects are seen as New Materialist agents from deep time, whose meanings and symbolism provide important input to contemporary debates about climate change and dealing with post-industrial landscapes.
DTA will consist of several cases, which will highlight a series of changing landscapes and bring them together in an overarching artistic project.
06. Floating Fathers (2024-in progress)
Location: Freiburg im Breisgau, DE, Budapest, HU, Belgrade, RS
The project is commissioned by DELPHI Art Space, Art Quarter Budapest, and U10 Art Space Belgrade.
Deep Time Agency has been selected as one of the participating artists in the Your Water Our Water exhibition cycle, taking place throughout 2024 in three art spaces along the Donau river. For the project, Deep Time Agency has been concerned with the critical rethinking of objects used in the “renaturalisation” of the Danube river.
We are especially interested in the idea of using so-called “Raubäume;’’ dead trees that are artificially introduced to the river. Our idea is to merge the industrial “founding fathers” of the modern Danube with the material entity of the Raubäume, transforming them into “floating fathers.” The exhibition shows several maquette prototypes that will form the basis for the future sculptures in public space, that will be developed in and next to the Danube river.
During their performance at U10 Art Space, Deep Time Agency took the public on a guided tour through the city centre of Belgrade and down to the Danube river, accompanied by a larger scale model of one of their floating fathers: István Széchenyi (1791–1860). During the walk, the public acquired insights into the history of the Danube river, learning more about its construction history.
The project, that is also on show at the exhibition, critically commemorates 19th century industrialists, engineers, and statesmen that played an important role in the cultivation and canalisation of the Danube river. While the taming of the river was seen as a heroic deed just hundred years ago, nowadays we face the direct and indirect consequences of these historical figures’ actions, and many ecological projects concerned with “re-wildering” the Danube are currently under way. As part of these re-wildering projects dead trees are placed in the riverbed to restore a deep time image of the Danube. With their project, DTA thinks about the role of the sculptures of the historical statesmen in these practices, reuniting them with the contemporary river in new and exciting ways.
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05. Gods of the Anthopocene (2023-2024)
Location: Biesdorf, Marzahn, Hellersdorf,
Berlin, Germany
Performative intervention, Red deer antler, paint, XLR cables, condenser stereo microphones, zoom recorder, headphones
Thanks to Ewa Dutkiewicz (Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte Berlin), Sybille Zellerhoff (Bezirksamt Marzahn-Hellersdorf), Marcela Pappen (photography)
Gods of the Anthropocene is a continuation of DTA’s previous project Ancestors Rising (2022). In both works, we focus on Mesolithic antler headdresses that were found in industrial or modern landscapes in Germany. The antlers, representing rare archeological objects, were most likely part of a shamanic garb, worn during important ceremonies in the stone age. They might have symbolized a connection with the wider universe, reaching out into the cosmos from the top of the head like antennae, channeling messages from higher spirits. Both works reactivate the prehistoric antler artefacts through public, site-specific interventions on their exact finding locations.
Central to the project is a replica of a 11.000-year-old antler headdress that was found in 1953 in Berlin, on the premises of the modern neighbourhoods Biesdorf, Marzahn and Hellersdorf. In anticipation of a new archeological excavation in the area, the project revisits the location and reinterprets the object and its purpose within an anthropogenic context. The replica is used as a boompole for two condenser microphones and as such redesigned into a communication device to talk to inhabitants near the findsite.
Location: Biesdorf, Marzahn, Hellersdorf,
Berlin, Germany
Performative intervention, Red deer antler, paint, XLR cables, condenser stereo microphones, zoom recorder, headphones
Thanks to Ewa Dutkiewicz (Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte Berlin), Sybille Zellerhoff (Bezirksamt Marzahn-Hellersdorf), Marcela Pappen (photography)
Gods of the Anthropocene is a continuation of DTA’s previous project Ancestors Rising (2022). In both works, we focus on Mesolithic antler headdresses that were found in industrial or modern landscapes in Germany. The antlers, representing rare archeological objects, were most likely part of a shamanic garb, worn during important ceremonies in the stone age. They might have symbolized a connection with the wider universe, reaching out into the cosmos from the top of the head like antennae, channeling messages from higher spirits. Both works reactivate the prehistoric antler artefacts through public, site-specific interventions on their exact finding locations.
Central to the project is a replica of a 11.000-year-old antler headdress that was found in 1953 in Berlin, on the premises of the modern neighbourhoods Biesdorf, Marzahn and Hellersdorf. In anticipation of a new archeological excavation in the area, the project revisits the location and reinterprets the object and its purpose within an anthropogenic context. The replica is used as a boompole for two condenser microphones and as such redesigned into a communication device to talk to inhabitants near the findsite.
During several days of recording, DTA documents the journey through the neighborhood, asking inhabitants how they see their role as the new “Gods of the Anthropocene”. By doing so, the work emphasises that the challenges with which inhabitants are faced in times of climate crisis are not new. At the end of the last ice age, the climate also changed rapidly, meaning that the first inhabitants of this area had to adapt to unpredictable weather patterns previously. The warming period was characterized by strong climate fluctuations, making it difficult for people to survive. They depended on many factors, such as weather and the migration patterns of the animals they hunted. They lived as nomads and their fate lay in the hands of the weather gods and other deities they worshipped. The Mesolithic shaman created change in the physical world from the visions he received from the universe, affecting health, fertility, crops and hunt.
The object reconnects us back to a time when humans still saw themselves as part of the natural environment, slowly discovering agriculture and the usage of fire while also trying to find a balance between the human usages of resourches and the grace of natural gods. Rituals of sacrifice were meant to keep the gods satisfied and the humans in check with the forces of nature, contributing to a holistic balance with their surroundings. In the industrial era and the Anthropocene, this balance has been disturbed. In this project we revisit this important moment in human evolution by reactivating the headdress on the location where it was originally found and instead of asking the gods for help, we turn to the people themselves. The final result of the work will be in the form of a sound piece.
The object reconnects us back to a time when humans still saw themselves as part of the natural environment, slowly discovering agriculture and the usage of fire while also trying to find a balance between the human usages of resourches and the grace of natural gods. Rituals of sacrifice were meant to keep the gods satisfied and the humans in check with the forces of nature, contributing to a holistic balance with their surroundings. In the industrial era and the Anthropocene, this balance has been disturbed. In this project we revisit this important moment in human evolution by reactivating the headdress on the location where it was originally found and instead of asking the gods for help, we turn to the people themselves. The final result of the work will be in the form of a sound piece.