We live in the era, which has erased dreams about future. Hasty imagination from recent decades, which produced landing on the Moon, is privatized; it lives only in the dreams of the Silicon Valley billionaires. Instead, every one of us is very familiar with the vision of apocalypse – the environmental catastrophe is already here and only now we learn about its real extent. To a certain degree, the gloomy mood and dystopian atmosphere echoes the images of space colonisation, as the pop culture presents it – it becomes its dark twin. Measuring Earth installation examines alternative script of the expansion into space: future, where we never leave the Earth, but we hide deeper into its core following the devastation of its surface and in the search of groundwater.
Mining, in general, can be understood as fetching the material out of underground onto the surface, but then we come to a situation, where we excavate, make holes in the ground. In case of surface destruction by products from excavated materials, our next step might as well be directed towards the stars, or under the surface. Based on last geological discoveries, it seems that underneath the Earth surface there is a huge amount of groundwater bound in the crystal lattice of the mineral called Ringwoodite. It is estimated that the amount of water stored this way is approximately one or even three times bigger than the volume of the oceans on surface.
The Measuring Earth works with this catastrophic situation, reminding narratives of the Fallout gaming series or other post-nuclear tales. Such ones, in which those, who survived are put into the underground bunkers, so that after the decontamination period they can go out again to the devastated surface and again fight for their place on Earth. However, the video foresees the exodus underground from reasons other than radiological. We won´t go underground out of necessity to hide, but to excavate the water. Hope for return is cancelled, our new home will be darker and more severe than ever thought. If there is anything what defines our era, then it is the visions of our future persistently getting darker and darker.
