Liquid Time - An Earthy Archive of Weathering Thoughts

LIQUID TIME - An Earthly Archive of Weathering Thoughts 2022 by artist Monica Ursina Jaeger is an artistic meditation on natural and anthropogenic forms of sedimentation, erosion processes, geology and deep time.
For thousands of years, sands have been rearranged and deposited. They are buried under layers of sediment, lifted into new mountains, then eroded and transported again. It takes millions of years of erosion for a mountain to naturally become sand. Wind and, rain, microorganisms, and other forces abrade rock formations and break the grains from their exposed surfaces. At the same time, sand and gravel are being extracted at an accelerated rate for urbanization processes in all areas of the world. Sand is - after water - the most widely used raw resource in the world. It is used for concrete, glass, clocks and computer chips. Sand is also essential to measure and understand the concept of time and our cosmological entanglements. It is the raw material from which the world is built today.
The video work leads deep into the Earth, through cave systems and collaged underwater worlds into the human body. A female voice, sometimes a human, sometimes a grain of sand or even a city, guides us from remote mountain landscapes, through sand pits, construction sites, rivers and cave systems – both documentary and imaginary. The focus is on the poly-temporal movements associated with erosion and sedimentation processes: Flows of sand and gravel, the expanded time in geological depths, and the industrial accelerations inscribed in post-natural landscapes. It is a journey into the real and fictional spaces we invent and inhabit. It tells the story of bodies – living and non-living, their relationships, and co-existences.