‘No Sound of Water’, Arte Abierto, Mexico, 2021.

The various projects of the London-based Franco-German trio Troika – formed in 2003 by Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer and Sebastien Noel – often focus on how the ‘real’ is giving way to the ‘digital’, and the consequences. Recently, though, they have set new work into a wider, additional, narrative that forms part of their ongoing project ‘Untertage’ – meaning ‘below the earth’, or literally, ‘under the day’. That mixes the metaphorical and the literal in an original way, telling the past and future of the world as a story of salt. ‘What if you started thinking of Salt in terms of its own entity’, they ask, ‘gradually using humans to raise it out of earth, take shape, then acquire consciousness to finally come to dominate the planet and populate it with its own kind?’

First off, this sounds implausible. Yet, as Troika explain, the first tool – flint – is a silicate, which is within a broad definition of salt. The first mines came from digging down to find better flint, so humanity’s initial major excavation of the earth was for salt. Moreover, they point out, all metals are stages of salt. The first cities, the first fertilisation of the land, the payment of salaries in early capitalism – all salt. The cubes that form naturally in many crystals can be read as the start of geometry, rational thinking, order, orientation, progress … And more recently, photography as well as transistors and computing are salt-based. ‘Could we retell the story of mankind from the perspective of a mineral?’ Troika asked themselves. ‘Initially it sounds very arbitrary, but as we researched we found more and more things that fitted, understanding salt as an underground mineral with alchemical essence …’

That doesn’t amount to a scientific proof, but it is enough to arrive at many fascinating stories of how a non-anthropocentric and non-organic material might yet be conscious and central not just to the past, but to a possible future in which the human, animal and vegetable may have had their time. That way of looking at things counters the anthropocentric belief that Man is different from all other organisms, alone possesses intrinsic value, and is under the 'illusion' that humans hold unlimited power over the social and natural order of things. Choosing an inorganic substance as the central protagonist of the story is a particularly radical way to change that conventional order, and generate an alternative reading of our past, present and future. In Troika’s words: ‘Salt becomes an element of human and natural extinction while also being responsible for creating an era based on non-organic intelligence and synthetic biology.’ So it is that 3.5 million years of technological development are condensed in the sculpture Evolutionary Composite, which places flint biface, knapped by experimental archaeologist Dr James Dilley, on a silicon wafer.

‘Evolutionary Composite’, flint hand-axe, production silicone wafer, 30 cm diameter x 8 cm, 2021

Troika first focused on salt several years ago, when thinking about the possibility of making a salt waterfall. ‘The earliest photograph known of a waterfall from 1870’s was our starting point’, they explain, ‘from when it first became possible to transport the huge cameras of the time into nature. The blurriness in that image is caused by the necessity for a long exposure. But if you type ‘waterfall’ into Google, you’ll find the majority of images are still blurry – even though long exposure is no longer required – because that has become the idealised vision of the waterfall.’ Indeed, you can readily find photography tips along the lines that ‘a fast shutter speed, such as 1/320 second, freezes water’s motion, often giving an unnatural look’. Yet, say Troika, ‘when you’re actually there, waterfalls are more about seeing the mass and hearing the noise – they are so loud and mighty.’ They hit upon salt as the means to create something fluid that can look like that idealised image of water in a way that water, paradoxically, would not.

As installed in Troika’s show ‘No Sound of Water’ at Arte Arbierto in Mexico City, the visual spectacle is enhanced by an effect they had not anticipated: how salt reflects the changing colours in the film component of the exhibition. Those reflected colours are from Terminal Beach, a four-minute loop of a weirdly furry robot chopping down the last tree in the world. It’s a computer animation made by motion capture using an axe equipped with sensors, but convincing enough that several people have asked Troika where it was recorded. The film starts with a cinematic tracking shot, then switches to a drone view circling above, on to the robot’s view and finally the perspective of the tree, nicely encapsulating the range of subjectivities available and questioning which one might be ‘correct’.

The message seems straightforward: the long march of technology is destroying the world that it controls, taking us to a future in which conscious carbon-based beings have had their time and the machines have taken over even the quality of being cuddly. Yet matters are not so simple: the robot doesn’t actually make any progress in felling the tree – we seem to see just the initial stroke of the axe on repeat. So perhaps there is still time for matters to turn out differently. As Troika say: ‘It never gets anywhere – which is important so there is no conclusion.’ Nor is what you hear quite what you might think: the soundtrack suggests a jungle, but is actually a collage of space weather – lightning strikes, solar winds, and geomagnetic storms – as recorded by the British Antarctic Survey at its Halley Research Station on the Brunt Ice Shelf. Are we listening to matters of reassuring permanence or to the earth reasserting its primordial primacy?

‘Untertage’ also includes a series of works titled Irma Watched Over by Machines. They are paintings of palm trees thrashing around in hurricanes. The title conjoins Hurricane Irma, a lethal presence in the Caribbean in 2017, and a 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan. The poem, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, takes a utopian view of the technological future: ‘I like to think (and / the sooner the better!) / of a cybernetic meadow / where mammals and computers / live together in mutually / programming harmony …’ Evidently Troika’s paintings suggest a different outcome, and they do so with a pixelated effect that’s rather oddly coloured. Why so? They explain that they have developed a colour scale that aims to represent how a machine would see, which means translating red, green and blue light into colour pigments.