Adrián Villar Rojas On Time, Decay and the Fragile Afterlife of Art

Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas is having a moment this year, with major exhibitions unfolding across continents: a large-scale show at Art Sonje in Seoul, an architecture-wide installation at the Aichi Triennial and an upcoming exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum co-commissioned with Audemars Piguet Contemporary, debuting in the Jura Mountains (Vallée de Joux) before moving to the AAM. In Seoul, “The Language of the Enemy” has become one of the most talked-about exhibitions of the season, an ambitious production that transformed Art Sonje into a post-apocalyptic site evoking a dystopian, post-human landscape where human civilization has collapsed and machines and plants have taken over.

Despite the building’s relative modernity, Villar Rojas spent more than a month observing how the museum functioned, visiting daily and absorbing its rhythms. He couldn’t shake the feeling that the place was somehow abandoned, he told Observer shortly after the unveiling: “Looking at the cinema’s old chairs, at visitors wandering and getting lost in the corridors and staircases, I kept thinking of a ghost. The shell of a museum drifting away.”

Many of Villar Rojas’s projects begin by inhabiting a space, studying its meanings, memories and systems of value. All his works are inherently site-specific: he never uses space as a neutral canvas. For him, the very notion of the exhibition as an act of presentation feels impossible. “I can’t read something that is screaming to be seen,” he says. “The artificiality of the white cube is too dense, too overdetermined. My work has always been about rewriting spaces, not decorating them.”

That’s why many of his projects begin with what he calls housekeeping, a first act of care for a site and its condition: sweeping the floors, painting the walls and checking power outlets. It’s a form of gentle deconstruction and “cleaning” of its pre-established structures that enables other forms of labor and life to happen. At Art Sonje, this housekeeping became an act of caring through dismantling, “a way to gently unmake the museum from its museumness,” as he describes it. “I wanted to create a space where visitors could feel like ‘welcomingly undesired guests’—still received, but no longer at the center of the institution’s gaze,” he says. “In most museums, it is not only the art that is looked at, but visitors themselves are observed, regulated and disciplined.”

In this act, one can see echoes of institutional critique as practiced by artists like Michael Asher or Douglas Gordon, who used erasure, displacement or destruction to expose the hidden mechanisms of power embedded in exhibition architecture. Yet unlike their often conceptual or discursive approaches, Villar Rojas carries out this critique through matter itself, through corrosion, collapse and renewal, transforming the museum into a living organism marked by time and shaped by nature.

Villar Rojas’s first large-scale installation, Lo que el fuego me trajo (What fire brought to me) in Buenos Aires in 2008, already rejected both the traditional exhibition format and the notion of authorship. He filled the gallery with construction debris, built chimneys and arranged hundreds of hand-modeled clay objects—iPods, fossils, bones, even a small whale—on rough wooden shelves. There were no labels, only a pendant with his name engraved on it. At twenty-seven, showing for the first time in Argentina’s most important gallery, he chose to forgo visibility to protect the work’s autonomy. “It was the moment to be seen, the time when your name should be remembered. Yet I felt it was more important to protect the experience itself, to let the work exist without mediation, without the apparatus of recognition surrounding it,” he recalls.

That gesture marked the beginning of his shift toward a postmodern, rigorously non-authorial practice. “I don’t want my work to have an authorial point of view… I want it to exist the way reality exists. Reality has no single author; everyone and everything makes it at once, human and non-human, living and dead,” he reflects. “My projects aspire to that same condition: polyphonic, distributed, belonging to no one and to everyone.”

The way his projects are dispersed forms a kind of map that no one can fully read, scattered across the world in places with vastly different levels of accessibility. “Not all the projects I’ve made take place in the comfortable centers of Europe or North America,” he says. To him, this is deliberate, an effort to delocalize practice and work within specific, often fragile conditions outside the protective sphere of museums. “The map that emerges is shattered, discontinuous, and my audience is inevitably fragmented. By design, no one, no single viewer, will ever be able to see the whole picture.”

Questioning the construction of human history

This approach underpins his installation for the Aichi Triennale, which takes over an abandoned school in Seto City. Terrestrial Poems wraps the building in chaotic wallpapers and digital mashups, creating an immersive environment that celebrates both the vitality and transience of human existence. Occupying the entire former Seto Fukugawa Elementary School, the site-specific work features digitally rendered ecologies populated by early human species—including Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans—that appear as layered composites of organic, inorganic, human and machine-made matter. Layers of history and memory blend with dystopian images of the future, questioning how schools shape discourse on history and ancestry, often without considering the deeper heritage of the planet itself.

If his work in Seoul looks toward a post-human future, Aichi probed the fragility of the past and the ways its narratives are constructed and manipulated. As he explains, prehistory appeared in his work as he grappled with a sense of exhaustion in contemporary art. “Back in the early 2000s, it seemed to me that there was nothing truly new we could add to the field—only attempts to regenerate ideas, to reconstruct some more or less effective form of what we already called ‘contemporary art,’” he recalls. “When I began thinking about the impossibility of going beyond that horizon, I found myself arriving at the confines of human existence itself. What happens when art reaches its end, not stylistically, but ontologically?” he asks. “That question became a kind of fault line for me—an intuition that if I wanted to move forward, I had to step outside the human timeline altogether.”

“Prehistory,” he notes, “is a very recent concept, barely 250 years old—a construct born from an age of expansion and domination. Not so long ago, from a Western epistemic perspective, all life on this planet and the planet itself was believed to be around two thousand years old. Then it became seven thousand, then seventy thousand, then millions and eventually hundreds of millions,” he explains. “It was a shock—the realization that the Earth and by extension humanity, is far older than our myths had ever allowed. This shift occurred within less than two centuries, coinciding with the rise of modern science in Europe’s dominant economies. Prehistory is deeply political; it’s a story about how we write our pasts, about who gets to narrate the beginning of meaning and about how those narratives still shape our hierarchies, exclusions and violence.”

Today, Villar Rojas argues, it’s even difficult to define what is before or after. “Hypercapitalism no longer tells a story; it produces a multidimensional map. Yet because we humans still think and feel narratively, that leaves us in a state of profound aesthetic and political disorientation. Everything is simultaneous, circulating and hyperconnected,” he says. “Narrative, which depends on sequence and causality, becomes almost impossible.” If Marx described time as the substance of value and Jameson saw late capitalism as the spatialization of time, Villar Rojas sees financial capitalism as pushing that logic to its limit: “The future itself becomes a spatial commodity.”

In that sense, his work intentionally inhabits this disorientation. What remains are fractured, imploded narratives, stories that collapse into themselves, unfolding across multiple timescales and remaining fundamentally inaccessible.

In Aichi, digital manipulation opens a window onto that fragmentation. “The digital, for me, is not a tool but a condition—a new atmospheric layer in which perception itself mutates,” he explains. What may appear as a digital simulation is not about virtuality but the birth of another kind of gaze: a synthetic gaze that doesn’t represent the smooth continuity of technology but its rupture, the collapse of our representational codes under the pressure of another intelligence trying to make sense of us. “This gaze doesn’t belong to us anymore. It already belongs to those who will come after—perhaps post-human, post-biological beings who inherit the fragments of our visual culture,” he notes. “The digital becomes archaeological. Each pixel, each glitch, each compression artifact is a fossil, a residue of human seeing refracted through non-human cognition.” For Villar Rojas, the digital space allows the world to be rendered anew through the eyes of different species, perhaps even other consciousnesses, extending human imagination into a synthetic afterlife where it can at least approximate nature’s “deep time.”

Undoing the script for new revelations

In seeking to move beyond human notions of time and cognition, both Villar Rojas’s interventions in Aichi and Seoul unfold like speculative fictions, sites where possible futures and histories can be materially envisioned. Yet despite their immersive quality, he rejects the idea that his installations are theatrical. “I don’t stage scenes or direct attention; I undo the script,” he explains. His interventions strip away labels, guards and behavioral choreography. “I let people get lost, confused, even anxious,” he adds, arguing that his works are anti-theatrical, exposing how much theater already exists in the museum and in the way we are trained to look at art.

This logic was already evident in his 2017 project The Theater of Disappearance at the Metropolitan Museum, where for six months the façade bore a grey banner printed in the museum’s own typeface, reading simply the title. As Villar Rojas explains, it was “an intervention in the very language of the museum, a mirror held up to its own performance.” When it comes to sci-fi and reality, he believes the line has already vanished. “Our behavior is now more scripted, more choreographed, more observed than ever before. If there is a speculative dimension in my work, it lies in trying to temporally deactivate those systems of control—to open a brief crack in the story we are constantly performing without realizing it.”

Villar Rojas’s installations serve as sites of revelation, moments where primordial truths emerge from the personal or collective unconscious and transcend the fast pace of ordinary consumption-driven contemporary life.

Asked about his process, he admits it’s impossible to explain. This mythmaking, this intuitive and layered world-building, is both method and necessity. “My work begins before the conversation about making art even starts. It begins with the creation of conditions: social, spatial and psychological,” he explains. His mythopoiesis in space is not an aesthetic choice but a method: creating worlds with internal logics is a way to codify his own operational logic. This is especially evident at Art Sonje, where visitors enter through a back door and follow an unconventional path through the building. There are no wall texts, no staff, no instructions, only a symbolic and allegorical architecture that visitors must decipher on their own.

What Villar Rojas creates, in a Foucauldian sense, is a “heterotopia,” a real or imagined space existing outside ordinary time and place, a site that mirrors, distorts or suspends reality. His installations form functional and self-contained worlds, simultaneously physical and mental, that stage alternative orders of meaning, time and social relations, reflecting or anticipating the real world with the luminous power art possesses to reimagine its own conditions.

He illustrates this through a story: years ago, he built a whale sculpture from clay and cement in the desert of San Juan, Argentina and left it unlabeled. Years later, a drone pilot “discovered” it and news outlets reported a “new fossil found in the mountains.” “People traveled to see it, treating it almost as a sacred site,” Villar Rojas recalls. “It began to generate its own stories, its own mythologies. That is the way I intend my work to work.”

In this project, as in the one at Art Sonje, there is a clear attempt to move beyond human time and space, to imagine narratives that embrace non-human-centered perspectives. In this light, it becomes crucial that Villar Rojas fully accepts the impermanence of his works. “Over time, I came to understand that the only sculpture that truly interested me was our own species: entropic, degradable and finite.”

At Art Sonje, nature itself takes over: pumpkins sprout, moss spreads, moisture seeps back into the walls. “We disconnected the air-conditioning system so that the museum’s body could breathe again, to be affected, thermodynamically, by the outside world,” he explains. He removed reception desks, wall texts, labels and guards, leaving the building in a state of open vulnerability, deprived of the institutional framework that once substantiated its meaning. Visitors now enter as if stepping into someone else’s home. The building’s renewed porosity makes it part of a living ecosystem, the world outside that museums typically erase.

Villar Rojas presents nature itself as chaos: decay, smell and unpredictability that deny the perfection imposed by art’s sublimation. “There is no narratological, Aristotelian project behind my installations,” he says. “I do not tell stories. The matrix of life today is capitalism; we live in the Capitalocene.” Art for him, though deeply embedded in capitalism, remains a tool for exposing its structures. “If capitalism once provided the temporal architecture of modern storytelling—conflict, delay, resolution, accumulation—financial capitalism provides none.” His art unveils this illusion, confronting the simultaneity and hyperconnectivity that define our condition.

This awareness dates back to his first year in art school in Rosario in 1998. “I had the fantasy or perhaps the conviction that what we were being taught to produce, so-called contemporary art, shouldn’t last forever,” he recalls. “Since then, my practice has been traversed by the paradox of engaging with intangibility—disappearance, hyperobjects, vast timescales—through the trenches of tangible materials, often producing large-scale sculptural installations.”

Entropy, contingency and unpredictability have become central to his work. Resisting preservation is, for him, both political and philosophical, a way to counter art’s commodification and to locate his practice within a broader cosmological order, one that acknowledges destruction as necessary for transformation and renewal.

“What happens when one builds a supposedly sculptural practice without this anxious preoccupation with permanence? No project of mine is designed to survive,” he says. “There is no natural evolution of my work that can be collected—only fragile, perishable testimonies.”

At Art Sonje, the installation isn’t simply placed within the museum; it is entrusted to the body of the building itself. “The question of how to deinstall such a work is not logistical but ontological,” he explains. “The sculpture now lives within the microclimate of the museum—its temperature, humidity and shelter—and, in turn, the museum’s architecture has absorbed it.”

Notably, the tension between the physical intensity of Seoul’s installation and the digital environment of Aichi underscores civilization’s own duality between the natural and the technological. Both projects address our increasingly mediated access to reality, a world where almost everything reaches us through glass.

“Reality has never been flatter, cleaner or more distant,” Villar Rojas observes. “It reaches us perfectly framed by the hyper-resolution eyes of cameras—we consume the best and worst of our species through a screen.” He worries this condition has made us numb, unable to be shocked, moved or truly present.

That tension becomes tangible at Art Sonje, where soil, darkness, heat and smell confront the sterile mediation of the digital world. At its climax, visitors face a wall of glass behind which fire burns, contained and aestheticized like a relic of the primordial energy it represents. Surrounded by a grey digital mesh, it evokes a phantom space of infinite potential yet no substance, an image that questions what remains real in what we perceive. In Terrestrial Poems at Aichi, murals of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans gaze out from hybrid landscapes of caves and digital architecture, a 3D twin of the site that remains sensorially inaccessible.

“I no longer see art as communication or revelation but as an act of insistence,” Villar Rojas comments toward the end of our conversation, affirming that his work aims, above all, to provoke inquiry into deeper truths about our sense of reality, time and life, exposing the failure of the inherited structures that have long dominated Western thought and distanced us from a fundamental connection with the ecosystem we belong to. Humans are creatures who cannot stop creating symbols and refuse to be silent. The artist, then, is the most human and the most exasperated of beings—one who continues to speak even when there is no one left to listen.

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