The Deep Time Project - Wiesner Gallery
Worlds,
2025
Carbon to Rock Studio
Taking issue with global warming as a planetary ecological consequence of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, "Carbon to Rock" investigates the role of igneous rocks in the planetary cycle of carbon dioxide and the consequences of the anthropogenic hand entering this cycle (...) Our research has led to a series of deeply speculative architectural climate fictions articulated around volcanic rock and geoengineering technologies in the age of climate change. The project aims to be provocations that highlight the fine line between reality and fiction.
Ana Alice McIntosh
1. Igneous Cycle
The Earth Crust: Made of igneous rocks, across geological timescale cycle. A continuous flow of rock matter. Surging from the depths, as molten lava, solidifying, cracking, blistering. Coming out from divergent tectonic faults: the cracks of the Earth Crust where rock is formed. Slowly traveling the Earth's surface. Going through a process of subduction in the convergent tectonics faults: the cracks of the Earth Crust that suck igneous rocks, reintroducing them back into the Earth's mantle, melting them back into the depths of the planet.
2. Carbon Cycle
We humans are only 200,000 years old, but we now change the Earth and its systems more than all natural processes combined. In the past 100 years, we have released vast amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere upsetting the natural carbon cycle. We have been pumping back out to the atmosphere, carbon that igneous rocks took million years to captured to make life in the planet Earth possible.
3. Carbon to Rock Cycle
"Carbon to Rock" speaks for an architecture where humans, who have become a geological force, are both, accountable for the decline caused by technological achievements but now, also capable of stopping and reversing climate change. It is a position, a stance on discipline and practice to be able to continue living together.
4. Climate Fiction
Only a few years ago, the prospect of turning CO2 into rock for millennia would have seemed one of the most improbable fictions. Our research is deeply scientific and architectural, but also deeply speculative.
