Memories of Futures Past: The Artist as Geomythographer
by Adrienne Mayor

In the exhibition First Gods, Lost Animals at Aspen Art Museum, Adrián Villar Rojas imagines how previous eras might have perceived evidence of disappearances, extinctions, and calamities, while foreshadowing those yet to unfold in unknown futures. Somehow, ancient people discerned the future in the past, a feat that Villar Rojas achieves anew in his compelling “memories of futures past.” In depicting what appear to be vestiges of potential futures, Villar Rojas shows a marvelous ability to retroject art into the world before humans, even while impelling us to contemplate what might happen to art after the end of humanity. I think of Adrián Villar Rojas as an artist-seer, a geomancer, creating clairvoyant relics and ruins that evoke geological upheavals and vast passages of chronologies, with and without humans. Standing before his visionary installations, saturated with memory and stories, inanimate and human, one feels an uncanny sensation of time-traveling to both past and future.

Earth keeps records of time and change, embedded in rock sediments, fossilized life-forms, and buried human artifacts. Every landscape is a map of deep chronology. Humans have read the evidence in the earth since Homo sapiens and Neanderthals first gathered around fires to try to explain the world to themselves.

Indeed, geology, paleontology, and archaeology are not modern sciences: their earliest inklings exist in age-old stories of catastrophic upheavals, volcanic eruptions, devastating earthquakes, massive floods, vanished species, and lost civilizations. Think of the stories that arose when a hunter came upon a cache of exquisitely flaked, technologically superior flint points. Or when people gazed in wonder at the ruins of massive temples, built by unknown cultures. Or when travelers discovered seashells scattered across mountaintops and dry deserts. Or when enormous bones of bizarre animals weathered out of cliffs and streams. Stories about mysterious natural evidence are encoded in geomyths that have endured for generations.

Storytelling is how humans transmit knowledge and meaning across time. Geomythology preserves ancient observations, memories, and speculations about transformed landscapes, fossils, and catastrophes. I trace my own interest in geomythology to curiosity about the astonishing bones of long-extinct creatures that would have come to light in classical antiquity. How did Greeks and other prescientific peoples account for the remains of unfamiliar animals that once roamed their land, so long ago that their bones turned to stone? How did Indigenous peoples in North America explain fossil skeletons of dinosaurs? I found that the earliest tales inspired by fossils contain surprising insights about past life-forms, extinction, and deep time. I began to realize that geomyths were widespread, older than expected, and of great interest to scientists. And geomythology raises provocative questions: How far can cultural memory extend back in time? It turns out that some oral traditions have persisted for millennia.

Another intriguing question to imagine is the popular lore that might arise thousands of years from now, as earthlings seek to understand the origins of climate change or grasp the destructive exploitation of energy resources in a long-past age—our Anthropocene present. In the very distant future, will anyone believe that once upon a time our planet’s population numbered eight billion? Will people of the future know that, long ago, ice sheets and snowscapes blanketed more than 10 percent of the globe? Will tales remember a time when huge floating mountains of ice menaced ships at the poles? Who in the far future will believe that Earth was once home to millions of animal species? That there were more than 10,000 species of birds?

Might future fairy tales tell why birds, with feathers that glow in the dark, have come to nest in the ruins of primitive power plants of past eons? What sort of foreboding fantasies might lure risk-seekers and treasure-hunters to breach the sinister walls of iron thorns surrounding radioactive caverns carved in bedrock, deep under desert terrains? Millennia from today, will myths refer to the tremendous cataclysm that devoured the entire Pacific Coast, from the Town of Chief Seattle to the City of Angels? Might epic sagas describe how survivors escaped the explosion of Yellowstone’s super-volcano that obliterated the Rocky Mountain West?

Tales like these would become geomythologies of the future. The urge to comprehend earthshaking events and evidence of unfathomable scale is a timeless, universal human impulse. Grounded in a keen awareness of local terrains and imaginative ideas about the powerful forces of nature, geomythological narratives are tools for preserving memory and ensuring survival.

Art, like storytelling, can also be an adaptive technology for survival. But stories are not just human creations. Rocks and objects hold stories, too. Adrián Villar Rojas’s art taps into the extraordinary juxtaposition of inorganic and organic “art” and storytelling. The themes of extinction and preservation, what has vanished and what has remained, suffuse his artworks, and these ideas are majestically illuminated in First Gods, Lost Animals. Villar Rojas’s fabricated objects, especially his immense replicas of fossils, allude to stories told by geology and human beings. They are a powerful way to ponder how future humanity might carry on the ancient quest for meanings. As someone who studies the relationships between myth and material history, I am transfixed by Villar Rojas’s artistic productions, especially his fascination with fossils as records of loss and preservation.

Ancient Greeks saw large vertebrate fossils as remnants of gigantic beings from the Golden Age of myth. Medieval thinkers believed that fossils were lusus naturae, “sports of nature,” illusions meant to test faith. Since the seventeenth century of our era, science has prized fossils as tools for tracing the history of life before the Anthropocene. Today the awesome mineralized skeletons of long-lost dinosaurs and later megafauna tower over visitors to natural history museums around the world.

But what does it mean when an iconic natural fossil becomes a manufactured artifact? Consider the monumental centerpiece of the exhibition, the heavy, life-size skull of a Triceratops dinosaur, cast in bronze. Dinosaurs ruled Earth for more than 170 million years. Human beings emerged about 300,000 years ago—they never saw those incredible creatures alive. Dinosaurs left nothing behind but bones and eggs of stone and footprints in rock. We must use imagination and knowledge to reconstruct their bodies, behavior, and ultimate disappearance 65 million years ago.

What stories will future generations tell about the artifacts we leave behind? What manner of narratives might emerge from observations of the remains, relics, and ruins of our present? For a thought experiment suggested by Villar Rojas’s exhibition, picture this shocking scene: What if an epic natural disaster in Colorado suddenly buried Aspen Art Museum with its display of First Gods, Lost Animals under the earth? What if, millennia later, a few artifacts weathering out of the ground were to attract attention? What if the Museum became an archaeological site, excavated in some faraway future? What would human beings of a future time—or even aliens from another time and space—make of Villar Rojas’s carefully crafted bronze dinosaur skull?

The enigma posed by the bronze Triceratops skull, fabricated 65 million years after the dinosaur’s extinction, is just one example of how the artist’s retro-futuristic scenarios teeter on the brink of time and space.