Pedro Hurpia

deep time

(2021)

This project was held during the Resilience Residence Programme in Serra da Mantiqueira (Brazil), supported by Serrapilheira (BR), Pro Helvetia South America (CH) and Swissnex (CH).

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deep time | 2021

video still

HD | 16:9 | 10'42" | stereo | color

This project invites a radical reimagining of our relationship with the more-than-human world. A perceptual shift toward non-human beings, geological forces, and entities often dismissed as "inanimate." At its core lies an exploration of deep time: a temporal scale that defies human biological rhythms, where even the precision of radiometric dating (our most advanced method for measuring rock formation) carries a margin of error spanning one million years—an epochal span utterly alien to our fleeting, flesh-bound existence.

Using accessible yet imperfect technologies, I sought to materialize alternate dimensions of perception. By juxtaposing the ultrasonic cadence of a hummingbird’s wingbeats (captured through field recordings) with the imperceptibly slow erosion of stone by sunlight and water (revealed via time-stretched video projections), I create a dialogue between hyperactive biological time and geological patience. These contrasts expose the friction between human sensory limits and planetary processes that unfold in whispers over millennia.

Deep time | 2021

video still

HD | 16:9 | 10'42" | stereo | color

“[…] The mediating instruments, operating as gateways to the world of the other – the umwelt of the other – can take on different shapes. Among the most popular ones in our culture are those that cut through reality by committing to measurement, classification, and hierarchization. Those contraptions and what they allow us to see, hear, and get to know are characters in the images of Pedro Hurpia, who, among the mediators described here, builds a kind of meta-mediation. Hurpia highlights the tensions and limits that the utopia of an unmediated reality presents to us as a society, ultimately, as a species.”

Excerpt from the curatorial text by Ícaro Ferraz Vidal Junior, for Resilience Residence Catalog 4th Edition – Art and Science.

Measuring things | 2021

Creative process

Angle ruler and gloves

Variable dimensions

During the residency, varied procedures and exercises of measurement and positioning in front of the 'other' were carried out, in order to distort the original function of the instrument used and bringing a poetic bias to the movement or action.

deep time | 2021

Installation detail

Igneous rock, dust, acrylic and thermal blanket

Variable dimensions

deep time | 2021

video stills

HD | 16:9 | 10'42" | stereo | color

The speculative narrative of Deep Time emerged from two sites: the Serrinha do Alambari Environmental Protection Area and the alpine plateau of Itatiaia National Park. The script evolved organically, shaped by encounters with non-human actors and the material poetics of place. Birds, for instance, became protagonists in this story—not as mere symbols, but as speculative witnesses. Their seasonal migrations and transient presence in the park suggested they might serve as the mountain’s "eyes," observing brief human intrusions into landscapes that outlast us by eons.

In this work, rocks, rivers, and sunlight are not backdrops but active agents. Their interactions—weathering, reflection, sedimentation—compose a narrative of entanglement, where "inanimate" forces script stories in a language of slow transformation. Here, the camera becomes a mediator, translating scales of time and agency into fragments graspable by human senses, yet always hinting at vast, ungraspable depths beyond the frame.