Working with humble materials such as unfired clay and cement, Adrián Villar Rojas blurs the line between creation and decay, crafting works that already appear fossilized at birth. Born in Rosario, Argentina in 1980, he builds vast, ephemeral worlds that seem both unearthed and foretold—like ruins from civilizations that have not yet existed. His practice sits at the intersection of science fiction, archaeology, and environmental elegy, confronting us with the question: What will remain of us when we are gone?

The Poetics of Decay

At first glance, Villar Rojas’s installations resemble remnants of ancient empires or the skeletal debris of alien worlds. Yet beneath their crumbling facades lies a poetic paradox: his materials—clay and cement—are among civilization’s oldest symbols of endurance, but in his hands, they are made deliberately transient.

His 2012 series Return the World, created for dOCUMENTA (13), began with something as mundane as a chicken bone found on the ground. Enlarged and cast into a monumental sculpture, it became a tree trunk, a relic of transformation. The gesture encapsulates Villar Rojas’s ability to translate the ordinary into the mythic, to reveal cosmic significance in the smallest fragment.

Over time, these works are not preserved but destroyed. Each exhibition marks both an ending and a renewal, as fragments are reused in new installations. Organic materials—wood, leaves, soil—are folded into the sculptures, ensuring their eventual decomposition. The process mirrors the ecological cycles of death and rebirth, offering quiet resistance to the art world’s obsession with permanence.

As the artist notes, his practice reflects “an alien mind that thinks retrospectively about human culture… playing with absolute respect and seriousness, as children do.”

The Nomadic Architect of the Anthropocene

Villar Rojas’s studio functions like a traveling ecosystem. His projects unfold across continents—from the Louvre’s gardens to Istanbul’s Bosphorus and the Korean Demilitarized Zone—each site reshaping the work’s form and meaning.

I can’t produce experiences in a mental state of epistemic vacuum.

– He sees his nomadism as an ethical practice and says.

Each site demands research, collaboration, and immersion.

In Yangji-ri, a village within the DMZ, he transformed everyday life into cinematic ritual. Collaborating with elderly residents, he staged communal meals and filmed their stories, culminating in the trans-fictional work The Most Beautiful Moment of War (2017). Later, he leased a vacant home in the village, preserving it almost as an artifact—its furniture intact, a freezer still running with two cakes inside, footprints in the dust untouched. The house became a living memorial to transience, a meditation on time’s slow violence.

Such gestures reveal Villar Rojas’s deep empathy for fragility as form. His ruins are not monuments to power, but elegies for impermanence.scendence.

The Last Artwork on Earth

Villar Rojas once imagined what the final artwork made by humanity might look like. His 2010 Songs During the War, created for the Serpentine Map Marathon in London, envisions the last five humans staging Neanderthal rituals in a deserted amphitheater. This haunting fiction folds time upon itself: the end of the future collides with the beginning of the past.

In that moment of extinction, he suggests, time loops— “two mirrors facing each other, producing infinite feedback.” Art becomes not a triumph of civilization but its echo, resonating into silence.

This fascination with temporal collapse continues in Poems for Earthlings (2019), his immersive installation at Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk. Inside the candlelit church, Villar Rojas constructed an acoustic cavern of memory: a chorus of sounds—babies crying, chimpanzees screaming, Beatles melodies, industrial machines—fused into a sprawling sonic archive. It was both hymn and requiem, a monument to the immaterial, questioning why we cling to permanence when sound, the most fleeting medium, may be the truest memory of life.

Between Earth and the Moon

In his recent exhibition El fin de la imaginación (The End of Imagination) at The Bass Museum in Miami, created with long-time collaborator Mariana Telleria, Villar Rojas recontextualized earlier works in a lunar-like landscape. Here, the question of terrestrial fictions expands beyond Earth.

What will happen when our myths—Greek gods, national anthems, empires—travel to outer space?

– He asks.

On the Moon, where every footprint may endure forever, humanity’s stories risk freezing in place, fossilized like his sculptures. The Moon becomes the ultimate museum, a repository of human ambition preserved by vacuum and silence.

His sculpture David, Two Suns (2015–22) embodies this dialogue between past and future. First exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery, the toppled David—once mistaken for a sleeping figure—was later understood as a fallen monument, echoing the dismantling of colonial statues across the world. Reinstalled in Miami’s moonscape, it found its true context: a relic of human hubris, now adrift in the cosmic dust.

The Beauty of Disappearance

Villar Rojas resists legacy.

In 500 years Shakespeare and the worst writer will be the same thing: nothing.

– He muses.

His refusal to preserve his work is not nihilism, but an act of liberation—a radical trust in entropy as authorship.

He constructs worlds destined to dissolve, yet within that fragility lies profound endurance. Like an archaeologist from the future, he unearths the present moment, translating humanity’s anxieties—ecological collapse, technological overreach, existential fatigue—into objects that feel timeless and already gone.

Villar Rojas reminds us that to be human is to build knowing everything will crumble. His art, hovering between ruin and revelation, invites us to see beauty not in what survives, but in what fades with grace.