Ancestor Shrine
Amid the Santa Monica Mountains, Neolithic anthropomorphic clay figures (0007000 BCE) keep vigil in a sacred circle. Excavated in the 0001980s CE, conserved, and displayed in pristine museum galleries and art temples, they survived the Great Cataclysm, when asteroid Apophis struck California in 0002029 CE and urban, technology-dependent life was largely abandoned.
In the aftermath, these icons have taken on renewed cosmological power for rural practitioners whose cultures long acknowledged extraterrestrial presence. Revered as divine conduits, the figures now preside over rituals of renewal, holding collective memory as it is continually reborn through time.
An archival image of the cache of sculptures
An archival image of the cache of sculptures from the Californian Neolithic discovered by Great Cataclysm salvage teams, left for us to find by our ancestors eons ago. In caring for these figures, we have been able to rediscover ancient knowledge and skills used in their making. Demarcating an outline for each figure from the entangled buried family and separating them as individuals, is the brutal love of this caring work.
An archival image of the cache of sculptures
The separation of our present landscape from its Neolithic past, the separation of the cache of sculptures from the landscape, the separation of the figures from each other, results in the production of treasured heirlooms to be worshipped. This is the separation of us from this world, of subjects from objects, of culture from nature, present from the past, of people from things.
An archival image of the cache of sculptures
The Ancestor Shrine was not a group of pre-existing objects with inherent properties. Rather, it is a phenomena that is constituted and reconstituted from historically and culturally specific iterative intra-action of material discursive apparatus of shrine production. The ancestor shrine is a co-substantiated hybrid object of origins and destinations, which acknowledges the extensive work needed to link our beginnings with its ends.
Artist’s impression of objects on display
This artist’s impression imagines similar objects displayed in Pre-Impact pristine museum galleries and art temples. It depicts a world of unimaginable hedonism, where the resources of the many were extracted by the few and transformed into opulent monuments to individual power. These sites materialized the brutality of self-love and selfish care, elevating excess into a spectacle of dominance and a lack of compassion for the planet’s failing earthly balances.
AI reconstruction of objects on display immediately post-impact
An AI reconstruction of what we imagine to be similar objects on display at art temples immediately post-impact. For many this destruction was a long overdue retribution for the crimes committed by humans against the other inhabitants of the planet. Warnings of the predicted disaster were not headed then. Venerating our ancestors in shrines harnesses their protective cosmological power to prevent this from happening again.
