Fragmentin’s solo exhibition “Subsoil Speculations” opens at the Swiss Alpine Museum in Bern (CH), presenting new works from the Swiss collective and 2023 SAC (Swiss Alpine Club) Art Prize winner’s post-digital archaeology series. Global Wiring (2023, image), for example, imagines a tech-contaminated core sample of Alpine strata in LED-illuminated glass—a gallery version of the 2022 outdoor original. By extension, the generative video Data Core (2023, image) traces CGI drill hole depths.

Brazilian researchers report the finding of “plastic rocks” on the remote island of Trindade, part of a volcanic archipelago about 1,100 kilometres off mainland Brazil. Chemical tests revealed the main pollutant forming these plastiglomerates to be synthetic fishing nets that wash ashore and ‘melt’ into the sediment when temperatures rise. “This is new and terrifying at the same time, because pollution has reached geology,” says Fernanda Avelar Santos, a geologist at the Federal University of Parana.

“REVENANTS,” a show featuring Kelly Richardson, Nicholas Sassoon & Rick Silva, opens at the Rectangle artist-run space in Brussels. Addressing notions of scale and the geological, Richardson’s Origin Stories (2023) zooms in on the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Sassoon’s lava rock-inspired The Prophet (Tanaga 1) (2023, image) evokes what exhibition essayist Alexandra Crouwers describes as “the unimaginable turmoil that is in a constant grind beneath our feet.”

“Earth Indices: Processing the Anthropocene,” a show by Giulia Bruno & Armin Linke working in consultation with the Anthropocene Working Group, opens at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). Foregrounding imagery that translates evidence of the earth’s transformation into “data that can be interpreted” (image: Line Scans of Antarctica Ice Core, 2022), the show reveals the “instruments, procedures, and practices” that produce geological knowledge, write the curators.

Rick Silva’s solo exhibition “PEAKING” opens at Oregon Contemporary, Portland, centering on the Brazilian-American artist’s newest 3D animation. In the piece, myriad variations of a floating mountain peak interact with fluctuating graph lines, echoing the geologic deep-time of the region. “As the frequency of the formations escalate, so does the sentiment of ‘peaking,’ in its sublime quantifications, ecstasies, and precipices,” curator Ashley Stull Meyers writes.