Diagenesis
A cellar made of bricks in Vienna’s historical center becomes the setting for an archaeological fiction and a speculative geological scenario — Diagenesis, an installation shaped by the displacement, transformation, and collaboration with local matter. A dialogue between the human and other-than-human; between past, present, and future.
Through processes of chemical weathering and material erosion, the work rethinks decay not as destruction but as a generative force. Diagenesis stages a site where the deep time of Earth’s crust, urban material histories, and imagined geologies converge.
The project consisted of a ceramic installation in a historical brick cellar in the city center of Vienna, where the current state of the brick walls served as the point of departure for the conceptualization and research process.
Three earthly, active bodies lying on cellar dust were framed by a brick structure, undergoing a chemical weathering process in which their material composition reacted to acidity -decaying and growing simultaneously. Each body existed at a different stage of transformation, following its own rhythm in response to the surrounding temperature and humidity.
Using locally sourced clay from key sites such as Wienerberg Lake -a former clay mine where Vienna’s largest brick producer once extracted clay- and other locations across the Vienna Basin, the ceramic objects embody the stories that are intertwined in their materiality.
Placed in direct dialogue with the walls of the cellar, the installation simulated an archaeo-geological excavation, acting as a window to another time frame. The ‘excavation’ functioned as a site where multiple agents and their entangled histories entered into conversation: geological time, material displacement, artificial transformation, and decay mechanisms -forces I prefer to understand as constructive- clearly visible in the weathered bricks that still support the cellar at Domgasse 6.
The project opens up questions in multiple directions:
What might an increasingly acidic world look like?
Can decay and disintegration be understood as creative rather than destructive processes?
How deep—and how lasting—is the impact of human activity on Earth’s crust and its geological record?
And how might we collaborate with matter to build non-human narratives?
Diagenesis (2025)
Installation
Vienesse Clays, limestone, sediments, acetic acid, brick dust, foraged bricks
With the kind human support of:
Ceramics Studio, Die Angewandte
Prof. Johannes Weber, Conservation department, Die Angewandte
Art & Science department, Die Angewandte
Exhibited at:
Minuszwei
Domgasse 6, 1010 Vienna.