A recess opens up before our feet. Our gaze falls onto elongated objects of pottery that were formed from local earth, construed and kilned there. For the latter, field firing was used, a technique that was already used to harden ceramics more than 5 000 years ago. Now the objects display small notches and ornamental patterns on their surface, reminiscent of scales or individual vertebrae, of fossilized plants or even the tip of an arrow. In their ambiguity they remain ambivalent, leaving the question from which time they originate unanswered. This speculative character is captured in the title of the installation.
With the installation Fossil Fantasies, Lithic Alliance picks up on the themes to which the fluid collective has devoted itself time and again: for example, the consideration that earth is not simply dead matter nor the simple accumulation of geological layers. Rather, it is a reservoir of encounters and energies; a living actor and witness of past and present times. Man has recently taken up the exploration of these temporalities. Thus, the installation itself resembles an archaeological excavation: an example of this is the grid of the roofing, which serves as a means of surveying. The orange roof creates an artificial atmosphere in the pit, symbolic of that filter - the anthropocentric gaze - through which we seek to explore our environment. Accordingly, the influence of humans on the planet is also a central element for Lithic Alliance: the collective also deals with the traces that humans leave on the earth. At the end of the exhibition, the objects will be buried - a condensed message for the future?