For Helsinki Biennial 2023, Adrián Villar Rojas has created a site-specific sculptural work in dialogue with the environment and inhabitants of Vallisaari Island. The work has its roots in Villar Rojas’s Brick Farm, a series of works inspired by the Argentinian hornero bird, which makes its nests from mud, straw and rubble, adapting them to human-built surroundings. In the new work, however, there is a shift from the organic, ephemeral sculptures inspired by the hornero to a more artificial, yet still more-than-human mode of materiality.

Using an amalgamation of software systems collectively described as the ‘Time Engine,’ Villar Rojas has generated a series of intensely detailed virtual worlds and placed sculptures within them.

Simulating various environmental and socio-political conditions across timespans ranging from hours to millennia, the Time Engine allows him to take his already experimental sculptural practice to a new level, creating works in places and times that surpass our tangible realities.

As the extreme conditions of each world bore down on the sculptures, they became ever more complex and harrowed. Fires scorched them, altered gravity distorted them. Unrest toppled them, wars wounded them. Other life forms sheltered within or bloomed upon them. The artist modelled worlds, which in turn modelled the sculptures. The effect of the environment and time on his work has always been an important part of Villar Rojas’s practice. From the beginning of his career, he has been interested in the interaction between inorganic and organic or human-made and so-called natural materials. He exposes his art to the elements, unconcerned bout how it is influenced by the environment—for him, destruction and decay are brought about by the inevitable entropy of being in the world.

Caption: Adrián Villar Rojas
“The End of Imagination,” 2023
Live simulations of active digital ecologies layered composites of organic, inorganic, human, and machine made matter.
3-D printer-PLLA filament, resin, automotive and synthetic paint, and lacquer