No Sound of Water forms part of Troika’s ongoing project Untertage. Meaning “below the earth”, or literally, “under the day”, Untertage takes shape as an elaborate ecosystemicfiction: its protagonist, salt, is devised as the hero of an aeonian drama of world domination. The crystal takes centre stage as an agent of cultural evolution, the critical component for the tools without which human civilization could not have developed as we know it. 

In a not-too-distant future in which our planet has become unliveable, this alternate reading casts its protagonist into the role of a genocidal and ecocidal mastermind, the creator of a new geological epoch of anorganic intelligence and synthetic biology once all organic life has ceased to exist. After having coerced humanity into mining and refining it, developing flint into arrows and quartz into microprocessors, salt brings about a new age of silicate-based ‘life’.  

Visitors find themselves in a charged space between two works; one is materially present to the point of being uncontainable, the other is confined to the realm of digital unreality. Both process or are processed by silicates—be it in the form of salt or silicon chips.

No Sound of Water (2021) delivers large quantities of salt from the upper level of its framework into its trough like a bottomless hourglass. The structure is adapted from an industrial processing machine, a reference to the extractive technologies that have contributed to the planet’s anthropocentric transformation.

Terminal Beach (2020) shows a forlorn and depleted landscape with a single tree – the last tree on earth. A robotic arm covered in long black fur is rhythmically applying an axe to the trunk of the tree, which shudders with each impact. The scene takes place at the edge of time, at the precipice after which there will be no conscious or at least carbon-based entity marking a here and now.

Troika are working through and making accessible ways of seeing and sensing that may represent actual alterity: if our world is ending, how do we cross over and become alien? How do we invite the shock and the pleasure of alterity in view of our own annihilation?