Maarten Vanden Eynde - The Last Human (2017)

What traces from our time will our descendants find, and how will they view the behaviour of humankind and our treatment of one another and of the earth? This question is at the heart of the oeuvre of Maarten Vanden Eynde (b. Louvain, Belgium, 1977, lives and works in Brussels and St. Mihiel, France). He has come up with his own term to describe his research into this future past: genetology.

It all began years ago with the question of which material would represent humankind to the archaeologist of the future. Vanden Eynde’s conclusion: plastic. This invention brought about fundamental changes for humankind but has become an incalculable threat to the earth. Vanden Eynde sailed the world’s seas, visiting the five major gyres, the ring-shaped systems of currents where waste collects, forming a kind of plastic soup. Each time, he fished large quantities of plastic out of the water and took it back to his studio, where he melted it to create a sculpture in the form of a natural reef, which grew larger with every trip he made .

At De Oude Warande, Vanden Eynde turned visitors into archaeologists or anthropologists of the future. An archaeological site in the middle of the park contained a futurist, bionic being, a clearly recognisable human form, with hundreds of computer parts on its skull. A human robot, a robotic human? Vanden Eynde based the structure on the Dame du Cavillon, a human skeleton that caused a commotion when it was found in France in 1872 with over two hundred seashells attached to the skull.

Vanden Eynde’s work refers to super-fast modern developments in artificial intelligence. Robots are being developed that are more and more like humans, while there is increasing integration of computer technology in the human body, with the most advanced application being the implantation of memory chips in our brains with the aid of DNA and biochemistry.

Could this be the last human?