I look at the present as an archive.
Archaeologies of the Anthropocene began with an unexpected discovery while I was searching the coast of Gran Canaria for a location in which to create a Land Art intervention for another project.
In a small cove, I came across a stretch of ground where plastics, corroded metals, concrete, pigments, fibres and other industrial remnants were mixed with sand, stones and layers of soil. Some lay on the surface; others already seemed to have become part of the landscape.
I stopped seeing only waste and began to see remains.
I wondered what someone in the future might find if they excavated that place and attempted to understand our time through what we are leaving behind.
From that way of looking, the project developed through photography, found objects, sculpture and installation. It does not seek to make waste beautiful, but to draw attention to what we have learned not to see.
The coastline becomes an involuntary archive of our presence.

Land Art video installation. The initial gesture from which the project emerged.

Four ways of looking at the same discovery

What the Tide Would Not Take Away
Real objects found and presented as remains of the present.
Figures of the Shoreline
Eroded remnants that acquire new forms and meanings through a sculptural gaze.
Paintings from Below Ground
Textures, oxides and sediments photographed until they begin to resemble abstract painting.
Layers of the Present
Strata in which natural matter and human waste are becoming increasingly difficult to separate.
This is what we are when the sea returns what we cast away.

The project emerged during the development of Symbolic Journey.
At the time, I was looking for a natural setting in which to create an intervention related to Land Art.
That search led me to a small cove in Gran Canaria where the ground revealed something I had not expected to find.
Among the natural materials were human-made remnants in different states of deterioration: fragmented, eroded, partially buried or mixed into the ground itself. The landscape seemed to be preserving them as part of its material memory.
That changed the way I looked at the place.
In a sense, I felt like an accidental archaeologist: not faced with the remains of a vanished civilisation, but with those of our own, still active.
From that came the idea of proposing an archaeology of the present.
I am not attempting to practise scientific archaeology or provide an environmental diagnosis. I use an archaeological way of looking as an artistic device: observing the territory, recording what I find, collecting certain objects, classifying them and, in some cases, intervening in or transforming them through sculpture.
The project always begins with a direct relationship with the place and the materials found there.
At times, waste remains almost untouched and is presented as a find. In other works it becomes sculptural material. Photography allows me to move closer to surfaces and strata until our perception of them begins to change.
These different ways of looking give rise to the four strands that structure the project.
Object, form, image and stratum.
Four approaches to the same reality and to the same question:
What will the remnants we are leaving behind say about us?

What the Tide Refused to Take

This section opens the trajectory of Archaeologies of the Anthropocene: Fragments of a Wounded Planet, transforming the remains collected in a cove on the island into real objects presented as findings.

Figures of the Shoreline

The section “Figures of the Shoreline” occupies the second place in the thematic structure of the exhibition. This area focuses on the transformative power of waste, where the fragments found acquire new visual identities.

Paintings of the Subsoil

“Paintings of the Subsoil” constitutes the third thematic area of the exhibition. This body of images offers a visual immersion into textures and terrestrial strata that, paradoxically, recall abstract painting.

Layers of the Present

“Layers of the Present” brings the thematic journey of the exhibition to a close. Composed of photographic strata with embedded waste, this series of images establishes the project’s central perspective: the documentation of the human trace as a geological layer.

What the Tide Refused to Take