Footprints and Future Fossils, MK Lit Fest 2020

Reading, In Conversation & Q&A
Produced by Future Fossil in collaboration with MK Lit Fest

Andy Merritt, Future Fossil artist, and Professor David Farrier, author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, talk to Fiona Boundy, Future Fossil Commissioner

Zoom Webinar, Tuesday 22 September 2020, 7.30 – 8.45pm, Free

Register to attend on eventbrite.

“What will the world look like ten thousand or ten million years from now?”

​Throughout autumn 2020, there will be a series of talks and activities exploring the ideas behind the new public artwork, Future Fossil.

In this first talk, Fiona Boundy, public art commissioner, explores the connections between the book Footprints: In search of Future Fossils and the ideas behind the forthcoming public artwork, Future Fossil, commissioned by Milton Keynes Council, with the build due to commence on site in Autumn 2020.

Future Fossil

In 10,000 years what will be left behind? Something & Son’s work, Future Fossil, imagines a future landscape where civilisation excavates the ground to reveal a still life of early 21st century home captured in fossilised form.

The work depicts a house from Oxley Park, a typical modern-day neighbourhood in Milton Keynes that has fossilised through the passage of time, being enveloped by rising water, encroaching deserts and man-made materials that nature has processed and reformed. The house has slowly decayed from the inside out, leaving behind an imprint of the Anthropocene era. The sculpture will be the size of a house and, through tapping into the city’s recycling schemes, will be made from the materials of time – plastic, concrete and aluminium.

In Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils David Farrier explores the traces we will leave for the very deep future. From long-lived materials like plastic and nuclear waste, to the 50 million kilometres of roads spanning the planet, in modern times we have created numerous objects and landscapes with the potential to endure through deep time.

Through literature, art, and science, Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils invites us to think about how we will be remembered in the myths, stories, and languages of our distant descendants.

Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils by David Farrier (HarperCollins Publisher, ISBN: 9780008286347) is available from Waterstones and other major booksellers.

Questions from the audience can be submitted in advance. Please email: info@futurefossil.online