Lara Žagar's Model of re-terraforming 2 takes us back to a time of darkness, reviving prehistoric memories of the beginning and questioning its cause. Algae, the planet's first terraformers, triggered a cataclysm for anaerobic organisms with their exhalation of oxygen, while at the same time preparing the stage for complex life. Their remains—limestone—hide the memory of a traumatic beginning: geological violence recorded in matter, in layers of rock, in the fossilized memory of algal bodies.

The exhibition is part of a project that has been in the making for three years, and while previous iterations of the exhibition presented terraforming as a speculation of a futuristic project, in this version Žagar returns to the beginning and does not view terraforming as a project of control over passive matter, but as a return gesture – a return to the original violence that inevitably connects time and matter, thus creating "deep time." Limestone, formed from sedimentary bodies, is activated in the exhibition as a liquid archive. The water that fills it becomes an indicator of the absorption and revival of this prehistoric process.

The model of re-terraforming is a confrontation with the negativity of geological and biological violence, which manifested itself in humans as a desire to terraform the world so that consciousness could exist in it. Žagar shows us a speculative synthesis: a diagonal between the trauma of matter and its archive. In this interpretation, terraforming is a form of defensive memory of nature itself—the persistence of negativity that enables the experience of violence as memory.

Artist: Lara Žagar
Text: Enea Kavčič
Thanks: Samra Buljić, Benjamin Fele, Miha Zupan