ROVINA UMANA
HUMAN RUIN
2026
wood, pallets, fabric, iron, motherboards, electrical cables, lights, keys, glass, radio telephone Portatel Solothurn 2, sound 3’34”, video 1080x1920p 21’48”.
Environmental dimensions
Installation view at
@ecal_ch @ecal_arts
A post-apocalyptic world takes shape in an abandoned place, an interstice of time.
Here technology no longer innovates: it survives as ruin,
as a prosthesis without function.
Through a 1989 radiotelephone, a soundscape spreads:
footsteps cross the room.
A door slams.
From a turntable, a love song from the 1930s begins to play, the voice falters, tears, repeats obsessively,
until it turns into a mechanical lament.
The next track slowly dissolves, as if melancholy itself were melting.
The vinyl stops.
The footsteps fade away.
The door slams again.
Exposed cables hang like severed nerves, oxidized motherboards guard irretrievable memories.
A bunch of keys lies at the center of the space:
they open doors that no longer exist, or perhaps it is we who no longer have locks.
Dry squeaks, irregular creaks, a mechanical noise spreads through the space.
Through a hole one can spy a figure, ambiguously human, stripped of identity.
It moves with unnatural slowness, in disjointed postures,
as if the body were remembering a lost language.
It is not an individual, but a condition:
the residue of what remains of the human being in a post-technological world, where identity has not been destroyed, but removed and archived elsewhere.
Every movement of this body is accentuated by the change in rhythm of the noises.
This place does not tell of a future catastrophe, but of a ruin that has already occurred.
It does not denounce technology as an enemy, but rather as an organism that has absorbed the human until rendering it silent, dependent, incomplete.
Here humanity has not disappeared:
it has become trapped within its own devices, suffocated by the remains of what it created so as not to feel alone.
Special thanks for the wonderful photos of
@daniel_walcher 🌹📸
