agustine zegers

Oil modulates everything¹

Registers of differentiated substrate belie the subsoil, hosting temporal litanies of lives accumulated by the river of time.

Oil is time materialized as sediment²

Raw geology is liquidated in a double-alchemical act, opening wormholes of aeonic transformation at the seafloor. Trans-touched by desiring object cartographies, bodies overcome all the obstacles that make timespace distinguishable.³

Oil reterritorializes planetary life⁴

Markings of fossilized death re-emerge as an omnipresent tissue, incorporating us in its irreverent choreography whose plasticity refigures ancientness, obliterating material hierarchies to find herself molecular, polymeric, relentless, everlasting.

^{1 Petrocultures Research Group, After Oil

2 Amanda Botezkes, “Visions of Eternity: Plastic and the Ontology of Oil”

3 Gavin Bridge, “The Hole World: spaces and scales of extraction”

4 Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism}

Installation view

virtud petrificante, 2024
Crinoid fossils, used machine screws, destructive distillation of shells, dry distillation of 35-million-year old fossilized resins

Installation view

transformación bentónica, 2024
seabed stone with fossilized fragments, microplastic accord, ocean debris accord, seaweed accord

Installation view

metanogénesis vítreo, 2024
ancient perfume bottles (ca. 100 AD), molecular derivatives of petroleum

Installation view

virtud petrificante, 2024
Crinoid fossils, used machine screws, destructive distillation of shells, dry distillation of 35-million-year old fossilized resins

Installation view

emporeidad-extático-horizontal, 2024
salt, post-consumer plastics

agustine zegers (b. 1994, Santiago, Chile) is an olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. Their work has been exhibited across the Global North and South at venues such as Olfactory Art Keller, New York (2023); the Venice Biennale, Venice (2022); ICA VCU, Richmond (2021); Lagos, CDMX (2020); Galería Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo (2018); and Galería Metropolitana, Santiago (2015).

(d)olor atemporal is supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.