Stanislav Zábrodský

Rule of Thumb by Stanislav Zábrodský (*1996), stages an archaeology of the future. The presentation reflects on time and materiality in the Anthropocene while probing the hybridities of nature and technology. Its title invokes the colloquial “rule of thumb”—a rough, pragmatic measure set against the precision of scientific calculation. How, then, do we measure time, materiality, and technology? How do we order and comprehend processes that exceed our grasp? Rules of thumb are fragile, prone to error. Likewise, the belief that geological or technological processes might ever be controlled or fully known remains a persistent illusion.

As Jane Bennett has argued in Vibrant Matter, materials possess a vitality of their own. Zábrodský’s practice underscores how this liveliness unsettles the human-centred narrative, situating matter as an active force in shaping human pasts and futures. Working primarily with composite materials, he employs them as synthetic simulations of geological processes unfolding across vast timescales. Rather than suggesting a linear passage between past and future, the pieces stage multiple temporalities at once. The fossil-like imprints that emerge are not natural, non-human relics but traces of human activity: remnants of the industrial revolution, technological products, and cultural artefacts. Here, Zábrodský’s oeuvre resonates with Jussi Parikka’s notion of a “geology of media” and with Ewa Domanska’s call for a “speculative archaeology”: his works imagine the conditions under which today’s residues will be unearthed, showing how technological matter becomes stratified into the geological record of the future.

The installation unfolds as a suspended system of pseudo-pulleys and reliefs, tracing the afterlives of landscapes and machines that persist as echoes within digital archives and sedimentary matter. What emerges is a latent interconnectedness: an infrastructure of movement suspended between two points. Within the pulley system, hardened flows of resin appear frozen in place: forms of continuous memory embedded in the evolving material culture of technology. Much like the famous “Pitch Drop” experiment at the University of Queensland, in which a single drop of tar takes years to fall, these resin traces evoke temporalities that far exceed human perception. They mirror historical technical drawings, preserving the memory of an industrial imagination, of a mechanism undecided in its function or purpose. The pulleys themselves, shaped like hourglasses, form a dual-functioning mechanism: a rotating tin axis carries sedimentary production imprints. At the same time, its pine counterweight introduces a biological temporality into the structure. Together they constitute a latent configuration: an open system in which the components only become active in relation to one another.

Alongside the central installation, the space is framed by a series of concrete reliefs from the series Whim Flips Over (2025): a quadriptych (235 × 107 cm) on one end and two additional panels (91 × 54 cm) placed along the side walls. In the wall reliefs, the artist turns from systems of movement to surfaces of inscription. Cast in concrete and resin, their fractured surfaces accumulate traces of vanished landscapes, industrial imprints, and digital afterimages, materialising the very tension between natural and technological strata. Jussi Parikka, in his Geology of Media, reminds us that the earth not only records natural sediments but also technological matter: rare minerals extracted for circuits, residues of industrial production, and, inevitably, electronic waste that will harden into fossils of tomorrow.

Rather than offering closure, Zábrodský, within Rule of Thumb, stages an encounter with matter in transition. Resin, concrete, and tin appear as provisional fossils, suspended between presence and disappearance. They point towards a time when the remains of our culture will no longer belong to us but to the earth itself: an archive not of memory, but of endurance. The works unfold less as monuments than as speculative artefacts. Here, time does not advance linearly but fractures, layering the industrial with the biological, the technological with the geological, and like Ewa Domanska suggests in The Return to Things: “Human interpretations of reality are not to be understood in terms of textual and linguistic structures only, but also as mediated by artefacts.”

(modified exhibition text by Livia Klein)