Sedimented Time

Sedimented Time explores how geological processes have transformed cultural understandings of time and how these shifts have found expression across the arts—from painting and visual culture to time-based, performative and contemporary artistic practices. It traces the iconographic and conceptual history of seismic imagery, from Enlightenment depictions of volcanoes and earthquakes to contemporary artistic responses to collapse and transformation. Through transhistorical dialogue and comparative curatorial approaches, the zone reveals how seismicity has functioned both as a material event and as a cultural metaphor across different historical periods, while examining how evolving concepts of geological and deep time continue to reshape artistic imagination, historical consciousness and cultural expression.

Associated epicenters

Selected references

Damisch, Hubert. 2002. A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bjornerud, Marcia. Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. (French original: Nous n'avons jamais été modernes, 1991.)
Dipesh, Chakrabarty. The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. University of Chicago Press, 2021. (On how the Anthropocene disrupts conventional historical time.)
Krauss, Rosalind E. "Grids." In The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, 8–22. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985.
Tapié, Alain, and Jeanette Zwingenberger (eds.). L'homme-paysage: Visions artistiques du paysage anthropomorphe entre le XVIe et le XXIe siècle. Exhibition catalogue, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille, 15 October 2006–14 January 2007. Paris: Somogy Éditions d'Art; Lille: Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2006.