EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS:
Part of the reason we’ve brought you two together is the resonances across the ways in which you work in quite different mediums, largely literature and sculpture in an expanded sense. I think much of that has to do with how you both work with and through and against time, or against a kind of fixity of history, particularly histories you want to counter. There’s also a very concrete, specific reason why we thought bringing the two of you here today would be generative, which is that you’ve been collaborating. Can you tell us about that?
ADRIÁN VILLAR ROJAS:
The collaboration started with a very simple gesture: I received Álvaro’s novel Sudden Death as a birthday gift from a dear friend. I loved the book; it came with me on many trips and flights. I underlined it, marked it. I was already workshopping with Álvaro in my mind long before we met. Then, in 2021, I approached him at an opening at Storefront [for Art and Architecture, in New York] and openly declared what a fan I was of his work. That’s how it began.
ÁLVARO ENRIGUE:
After that opening, I was telling my wife in the subway that I was talking to this brilliant person from Argentina. It was a delayed encounter of mutual admiration. She laughed, “You didn’t know who you were talking to?” From there, we found our common obsession with prehistory over coffee.
AVR: I was thinking about the very last stage of our species as a condition charged with a certain potentiality, and how humans might cope with the anxiety of extinction by staging some kind of performative event, one last “artwork,” one last cultural enunciation. Over the last fifteen years, I had been developing fragments of writing around these ideas, imagining what the last humans might decide to do at the edge of extinction. I shared this material with Álvaro, and those texts became the conceptual and narrative ground for the novella we’re now developing together.
ÁE: I have the feeling that we’re going through a Pauline moment, right? In his letters, Saint Paul the Apostle used to write that the world was going to end during his lifetime, tomorrow—this is it, so we must give the testimony of this world. Lyotard said that modernity began in that moment, when Saint Paul understood that time is linear, and not circular, and proposed a whole ethical world that would work if time is a line and not a circle. And I feel that we have the sensation of living in a world like that.
I’m certainly worried about, not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it, so we discovered that we share, on the one hand, terror, but on the other, admiration and an interest in this world, which seems to be falling to pieces around us. Adrián had been working with this idea of a previous end of the world for years already, so we began to work together on an idea that will take the shape of a book, which is a very simple and tiny thing, but still, I think, a revolutionary object.
AVR: I think it’s incredibly complicated to speak about “the end of the world.” Many ends of many worlds have already happened and continue to happen. So when I use this position of the end of the species, it becomes a space for exploration of the mechanisms through which humans have produced meaning, language, culture, and reality itself. Twenty-five years ago, I had—and still have—a difficult relationship with the post-Duchampian, post-readymade art field I found myself in. I had the feeling that it would only be a matter of time before art expanded toward every possible entity and experience, appropriating reality itself through concepts and language. Everything could eventually be claimed, absorbed, and reframed as part of the territory of art.
I found that to be a fascinating cultural dead end, an exhaustion of a certain position. It was also a very naive and youthful intuition. I was probably twenty-three years old. But my impulsive reaction at the time was to think: then let’s go to the very end of time, to a point where there are no longer humans producing this thing we call art. And at the same time, let’s also go toward deep time, toward worlds that existed before humans altogether.
In “The Library of Babel,” Jorge Luis Borges writes that every story has already been written, and that we are merely ghosts inhabiting this space. The idea is both terrifying and liberating, because it destabilizes the fantasy of human originality and authorship. Humans become less the creators of meaning than temporary inhabitants moving through an already existing symbolic field, endlessly recombining fragments that perhaps were already there before us.
From there, extinction and inheritance become entangled. Even if humans disappear, meaning production continues through other intelligences, systems, forms of life, and material processes. So “the end” is not absolute termination, but engines of transformation, recombination, and redistribution. Endings themselves become generative thresholds from which new beginnings emerge.
ÁE: Reaching for the beginning, right?
ECW: Let’s stay with this question of temporality for a bit, because I think both of you are known in your own ways for work that’s radically cross-temporal.
ÁE: When I enter Adrián’s work, it’s not an intellectual experience. I have this feeling that we’re living in the ruins of something, of a fantastic world that just disappeared. And we’re trying to generate a new limit and a new world.
AVR: Sudden Death created a kind of glitch in reality for me, which I found profoundly moving. In the novel, Álvaro imagines that the tennis balls used in the match between Caravaggio and Quevedo were made from Anne Boleyn’s hair after her execution. At some point, he mentioned that these balls were supposedly stored in the New York Public Library, and that, every year, people actually go there asking to see them. That was the glitch for me: fiction leaking into reality and contaminating it from within, until the invented story begins to acquire the density and authority of historical fact. I like it when things work as nonart. Early on in my career, I wasn’t using labels or names or titles for my work, like for Mi familia muerta [My Dead Family, 2009], which was a clay whale in the Yatana Forest in southern Argentina. I wanted to make something that was just “happening,” with no art qualities.
ECW: Adrián, regarding the logic of ruin, you’re often working with materials that show the stress and passage of time. There’s another really generative concept we get from the anthropologist Gastón Gordillo, who writes about the difference between rubble and ruin: ruins can continue to signify, which is why they can stay in a circuit of melancholy, but—and he’s writing in the context of a postcolonial landscape, often of profound violence—rubble is when a ruin becomes unrecognizable as a ruin; it teeters on the edge of being part of the landscape. In your sculptures, there’s such an interesting tension between things that do signify, as ruins do, but there’s also such a—maybe delicate isn’t the right word—but the precise relation to small, physical traces that signify weathering and stress, almost as if the materials are registering something we can’t pick up on. Something like unfired clay, for you, can grapple with or bear the stress of some of these horizons and torsions and loops of time.
AVR: Right on. [laughter]
ÁE: You can see how a writer is just a vessel for the images that Adrián produces, and I admire that so much, how, little by little, the mechanical text takes over the imagination.
AVR: The mixture of clay and cement gave me the possibility of speaking simultaneously about prehuman life on Earth and about a deeply human time. Cement represents the urban infrastructures we have constructed to sustain our lives, the buildings, roads, bridges, and systems that organize human existence at a planetary scale. Clay itself contains traces of countless lives that existed before us, organisms and forms of life that died, dissolved into the earth, and were transformed over immense periods of time into sediment, minerals, and matter. That same refined earth has continuously reappeared throughout human history in things as simple as pottery. In this sense, clay becomes a vast archive of lives.
These materials produce unstable structures because, when forced together, they fracture and crack in contingent and unpredictable ways. The works react constantly to temperature, humidity, shifts in weather, and environmental variation. The “sculptures”—I don’t trust the word sculptures, so it should remain in quotation marks—aren’t passive objects but active material systems reading and responding to their surrounding ecology in real time. I’m interested in constructing things that are intensely material but also deeply time-based, works that many times don’t even survive the duration of their own exhibition.
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Álvaro Enrigue is a Mexican novelist, essayist, and short story writer. He received the Joaquín Mortiz Prize for his debut novel, La muerte de un instalador (Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1996), and more recently was awarded the prestigious Herralde Prize in Spain, the Elena Poniatowska International Novel Award in Mexico, and the Barcelona Prize for Fiction for the novel Muerte súbita (Anagrama, 2013), about a fictitious tennis match between the Italian painter Caravaggio and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo. He is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores of Mexico and teaches Baroque and Latin American literature at Hofstra University.
Evan Calder Williams is an associate professor at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, where he also teaches in the Human Rights program, and is a contributing editor for e-flux Journal. Williams’s newest book, Inhuman Resources, was published by Sternberg Press in September 2025, and his novel The Losing Team is forthcoming from Riverhead Books.
Adrián Villar Rojas: First Gods, Lost Animals is on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 2, 2026 to April 11, 2027.
