The Key to the Present Lay in the Future

The Key to the Present Lay in the Future (25 hourglasses containing sand from 24 geological periods), Future Fossil Spaces, Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014

The Key to the Present Lay in the Future is made of twenty-five hourglasses containing sand from twenty-five geological periods, thrown against a wall by the artist Julian Charrière. All which is left from these eras are suddenly brought together in the same place and time as a result of a powerful act yielding glass debris and sandy remnants. The hourglass itself is already a well-constructed metonymy of the link between time and space since it allows an interval of time to be measured by the movement of matter. The work echoes that of Robert Smithson, and in particular his thoughts on the issue of non-sites, and recalls one of his works in particular, Hypothetical Continent (Map of Broken Glass: Atlantis), created in 1969, a pile of glass fragments which make up the fictitious map of a lost continent.

The Key to the Present Lay in the Future (25 hourglasses containing sand from 24 geological periods), Future Fossil Spaces, Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014
The Key to the Present Lay in the Future (25 hourglasses containing sand from 24 geological periods), Future Fossil Spaces, Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014
The Key to the Present Lay in the Future, Officielle, Paris, France, 2014
The Key to the Present Lay in the Future (25 hourglasses containing sand from 24 geological periods), Future Fossil Spaces, Musée Cantonale des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2014