1’111,111

1’111,111

Sneaker shoes structurally aged to a million years.

1’111,111 shows us that time traveling can be factually achieved, it can be materially experienced. In this work, several shoes have been chemically aged by a factor of 10; meaning that the shoe on the right is new, the one to its left is 10 years old, and so on and forth until reaching (the remnants all the way to the extreme left) 1 million years.

Sneaker shoe aged to a million years.

In this way we can witness at once the whole timeline in which an industrially manufactured mundane object is radically reshaped by Earth’s deep time into a geological remnant.
The initial trigger for this work came from the artist being introduced to actual “time machines” (weather and UV light accelerators) at the Technical University of Delft. These machines are often used to test materials used in industries such as aeronautics in order to simulate the passing of time by exposing the tested materials to unusually high amounts of UV light and other weather-related conditions.
Because aging-acceleration of an object, to turn it one million years old, by means of these specific machines would have demanded their constant use for thousands of years, finally Santillán turned to a different scientific method in order to achieve this goal. With the support of a team of chemists from the Amsterdam-based startup Spark904, by taking inspiration from the weather accelerators, an array of chemical mixes were developed in order to faithfully expose the shoes to their respective time-traveling age, in accordance to the estimated degradation of the different materials composing each shoe.

1’111,111 (2023)

Medium

Chemistry, Sculpture

1’111,111