Alexander von Humboldt - Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen. Tübingen 1807, reimagined
as quarry.

ABOUT 

In 2020, visual artists Miriam Sentler (1994, DE/NL/NO) and Wouter Osterholt (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.

07.    The Moving Energy Theatre (2025)
Location: The Shetland Islands, Scotland, United Kingdom

Performative intervention, photography, publication (forthcoming)

Team: Deep Time Agency & Anna Tudos, Marcus Nicolson (assistance), John Coutts (photography), Daniel Shailer (reporting & interviewing)

Thanks to Gaada, Shetland Museum & Archives, the Up Helly Aa Committee, Jon Pulley, Gilly Bridle & Sew Far North.


The Shetland Islands are a Scottish archipelago that lies approximately 480 kilometres north of Edinburgh and 320 kilometres west of Bergen, on the crossroads between Norway, Scotland, and the Faroe Islands. Shetland houses Sullom Voe, one of the biggest oil terminals in Europe. During peak times, up to 1.5 million barrels of oil enter the archipelago daily from the oil platforms in the North Sea to be stored in underground containers. Afterwards, they are shipped to ports worldwide. The archipelago is also a major player in wind and tidal energy.

Some of the energy industry’s traces are more visible than others for the 23,000 inhabitants living there. The ways these industries have changed island life and natural environments throughout history are often discussed, performed, and criticized by members of the Shetland community. An example are the short theatre acts that happen in the framework of the carnivalesque Up Helly Aa festival. A handful of historical acts from between 1972 and 2003 found in the Shetland Archives and the Up Helly Aa Committee Archive reference the energy industry through a critical lens and a specific aesthetic, marked by costumes, props, songs, and so on.

In light of the opening of the new Rosebank oil field north-west of Shetland (planned to start operating in 2026), it is time again for these discourses to re-emerge. TMET uses re-enactment and performative intervention to bring back and revive 8 selected energy acts from the archives. For this purpose costumes and props were recreated and placed back into the industrial environments the acts discussed and critiqued once, letting interactions around them unfold spontaneously. In this way, the costumes become tools for conversations around energy, that allow for contemporary discussion about what roles these industries play in the Shetlanders’ lives today.

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, “making-up” for the river’s canalisation practice in relation to shipping and hydro-energy. 

We are especially interested in the idea of using so-called “Raubäume;’’ dead trees that are artificially introduced to the riverbed to make it look natural again.

Our idea merged the industrial “founding fathers” of the modern Danube with the material entity of the Raubäume, transforming them into “floating fathers.” The exhibition on view in the three exhibition venues showed several smaller maquette prototypes that formed the basis for a larger sculpture in public space, that was brought back to the Danube river during a performance in Belgrade, held in December 2024.

During the 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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