Everyone and everything are fewer steps away from us.

Separation is a concept that expresses an act and a state of being. Pierre Huyghe overcame spatial boundaries to explore its original meaning through different artistic media. Travelling across history, Huyghe went back 30 million years and imbued the memory of this research across time within the exhibition IN. BORDER. DEEP, which was hosted by Houser & Wirth gallery in London in this Fall. The starting point in the exhibition’s overarching chronology was a film in which Huyghe used macro- and micro-scopic cameras to record insects encased in amber. It was a navigation through stone, in search of the earliest known specimen. Frozen instants are trapped and eternized by the movie. A primitive rock lies in sedimentation on the gallery floor, marking the origin of man and the development of rudimentary engineering. Three fluorescent aquariums darkness placed in the gallery established a secret connection with Claude Monet. They contained biotopes transplanted from Monet’s ponds in Giverny, the geo-engineered site made in 1893 and the subject matter of his famous Nymphéas paintings. As natural elements took control over the objects placed in the vats, the moss and the weathering have eaten the sculpture that visually dominates the exhibition space. Reminiscent of ancient Etruscan sculptures; the concrete cast seemed to fuse with nature, while embodying the primoridal birth of plastic arts. Questioning the role of the man and its constrictions in the present time, the Human Mask movie was inspired by a real situation in Japan, in which a monkey, wearing the mask of a young woman, has been trained to work as a waitress. The dystopian emptiness of the street of Fukushima, in which the film has been turned, touched the spectators deeply in their conscious by pushing them to reflect on their responsibilities as human beings.

There are six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet.