«A Millennium Before Them, To Their Spirit!»

Artists: Ker Wallwork, Abi Palmer, David Sherry.

Curator: James Stephen Wright, Newcastle upon Tyne

«A Millennium Before Them, To Their Spirit!» (Heinrich von Kleist)

This compilation is dedicated to the future generations that will come after us. The shadows of the future have already fallen upon us, shaping the way we work and rest within their bounds. The artists reveal this condition, even when its contours remain indistinct—or perhaps we must recalibrate our perceptions to discover a new clarity.

The videos are structured around the conflict between vitality and decay, between organic growth and mechanical destruction. The video itself becomes a medium of instability: layers of superimposed images reveal a spectral materiality. Frames capturing the slow decomposition of soil, abstract textures of rot, and industrial traces on the body of the ecosystem unfold a metaphor of time, where past and future collapse into an elusive present.

The artists engage with nature as an archive of colonial, technological, and biological intervention. Here, greenery is not merely greenery, but a residual projection of ecosystems altered by urban pressure. Water is not merely water but a membrane absorbing the history of toxic emissions and the currents of capital.

This is about catastrophe as a structure—about what happens when development turns into self-destruction. The question remains open: how can we conceive of nature not as a resource but as an autonomous agent? And is it possible for art not only to document this crisis but also to create the conditions for its rethinking?

We cannot calculate everything to the end to secure privileged positions for ourselves, but we act in the present, listening to our inner voices without prejudice.

(James Stephen Wright & Stanislav Kholodnykh)