At a time when dystopia no longer belongs to the realm of speculation but to everyday experience, our ability to imagine the future seems increasingly compressed. The promise of a future better than the present, central to the idea of progress, is becoming harder to imagine.

 

“Progress” has long been used as a promise without a clear destination. In public and political discourse, it describes a movement towards something believed to be better than the present. The losses and sacrifices that take place in the meantime can therefore be justified in the name of a better tomorrow. Yet progress is always unfinished. As long as it continues, we cannot know where it will lead.

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The artwork shifts this perspective. Rather than looking towards the future, it looks back from it. It imagines a hypothetical archaeology of a civilisation after human presence, where the city is no longer a place of habitation but a collection of remains.

 

At the centre of the work is the urban landscape of Athens. The city is fed into a crusher, and its fragments are emptied out before our eyes. A city we know as a place of habitation, movement and everyday life is presented as a collection of remains. From these remains, we try to reconstruct not only the city, but also the idea of progress that shaped it. What remains when human presence is removed from the landscape? What do the traces that we are already leaving behind us tell us?

And what might the remains of a civilisation that still believes it is moving forward look like, when seen from the distance of the future?

 

Our traces, however, do not necessarily mark the end of the story. Nature does not need to replace us or overcome us. It can simply continue,  eroding, covering, transforming and, over time, absorbing our remains into a new balance. Perhaps the last sign of progress is not what we leave behind, but the moment when we cease to be at the centre of the story.

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Photos by the artists and Antonis Photography