Synthetic Geologies explores cement as a medium in flux—one shaped by the compression of deep time into industrial time, where stone is extracted, fragmented, calcined, and recombined into synthetic rock formations that mimic yet diverge from their geological origins. Cement is not merely a material but a process, a site where the natural and the manufactured collapse into one another, unsettling any clear boundary between geology and industry.

At what point does a material cease to be "natural" and become "synthetic"? Cement, as a reconstituted form of limestone and clay, embodies this ontological instability, existing simultaneously as a geological residue and an artifact of human engineering. By recontextualizing cement, the exhibition disrupts its conventional anonymity, revealing it not as a passive binder of aggregates but as an active site of material memory, where its transformations can be read, traced, and made tangible.

Through sculptural interventions and material displacements, the works navigate the entanglement of human and geological forces. Some forms appear as if excavated from an unknown past, while others anticipate a fossil record yet to come, a moment in which synthetic and natural sediments become indistinguishable. If the built world functions as an artificial stratigraphy, what does it mean to manufacture stone? And if concrete, once set, is destined to fracture and erode, how does this cycle of making and unmaking define the geologies we now construct?

Cement clinker, the granular residue of high-temperature calcination, is itself an intermediary state—neither raw nor fully realized, suspended between disintegration and recomposition. Its production resembles the earth’s own metamorphic processes, where heat and pressure induce irreversible material shifts, yet here, the transformation is intentional, directed, and infrastructural.

The sculptural objects, formed through a process inspired by natural cementation—the slow lithification of sediment through mineral binding—allow particles to settle and bond in unpredictable ways. Some appear as if unearthed from an unknown past, while others suggest remnants of a future fossil record, fragments of an era in which the geological and the manufactured have become indistinguishable.

Project info