Since he started his career as an artist, Hicham Berrada has been working out how to create new worlds by taming the laws of the world we live in. Whether they are laws of chemistry, biology or physics, he uses them to generate fantastical images of potential landscapes.  

For “Vestiges”, his third exhibition at the gallery, Berrada invites us to contemplate printed circuits in a process of metamorphosis. Users are more or less unaware of them, but printed circuits are a crucial element of many aspects of our lives, centralising and directing the connections in the indispensable technology that we use every day. They are the heart—made of metals, such as silver, copper, palladium, platinum and gold—of our computers and our mobile phones and, due to their complexity, monuments in themselves to human thought. Unfortunately, printed circuit boards are ephemeral monuments: where are the cell phones of yesterday? The obsolescence of electronic components keeps pace with technological progress, and planet Earth is riddled with the dead weight of the superseded elements as they revert to pure materiality: assemblages of various metals and alloys in variable forms.  

 In response to this phenomenon, Hicham Berrada explores three different media to evoke three physical states and temporalities. In a series of new videos, the visitor is presented with four printed circuits decomposing in an electrolytic solution, a reminder that the digital world has its own materiality, and that this materiality wears out, ages and pollutes. A detached contemplation of this complex manufactured object reminds us of our own corporeal nature, and its destruction comes across as a paradox. Is this a post-apocalyptic world in which the organic overrides the technological, a world in which metals dissolve in the ocean and cities go up in smoke? Or is it an Earth from the distant past that has been abandoned permanently by humankind? Should we view it as a kind of vanitas of the contemporary world?  

 Disintegration and decomposition are also invoked physically within the exhibition space, in spite of their being pretty well beyond our powers of perception. The terrarium on display looks as if it might have come straight out of a natural science museum, presenting us with an image of the anthropocene. The natural soil, which harbours plants and mosses, is littered with disused printed circuits, and the metal elements that make them up are being devoured by the mycelium of fungi that the artist has deliberately introduced to encourage the absorption of anything that contaminates it. These mushrooms, used to rehabilitate the sites of disused factories, rubbish dumps and similar technogenic accidents, are the “sleeping” agents of the natural world. Slowly but surely, they chew their way through the computer components in a post-human performance which, although invisible to the naked eye, is no less real. Only petrichor, the distinctive scent produced when rain falls on dry soil, betrays their unusual presence. In the apparatus Hicham Berrada has devised, the printed circuits of yesterday gradually return to “Earth”, an earth that takes olfactory possession of the exhibition space. The laws of nature and those organic agents assist the artist in sculpting the work, inviting us to meditate on the future of humanity and the things that are likely to survive it. In the half-light of the last room, the visitor is confronted with blocks of resin with landscapes fixed inside them for ever. For this third phase, Berrada has immersed the printed circuits in electrolytic baths in which the metals of which they are composed have been reorganised by the laws of chemistry into crystals, cliffs, rocks, and ghostly trees, looking like landscapes of an unknown planet, a weird and different world. The forms suggest the remains of some futuristic archaeology, or, as it might be, they contain fragments, scattered elements of our recent past, like species of insects that no longer exist, trapped for eternity in globules of amber.  

Hicham Berrada's “Vestiges” can be seen as an exhibition of alternative arrangements of chemical elements, or as an alternative ecological trail—a vision of a parallel world in which earthly matter is organised quite differently. With no temporal reference points, we the spectators are free to project ourselves into a prehistoric past, a technological present or a probable future, whether it a hoped-for future or one that we dread.  

— Alexandra Khazina Translated by Jeremy Harrison