Synthetic Geologies

by Studio Eidola

Synthetic Geologies explores cement as a medium in flux—one shaped by the compression of deep time into industrial time, where stone is extracted, fragmented, calcined, and recombined into synthetic rock formations that mimic yet diverge from their geological origins. Cement is not merely a material but a process, a site where the natural and the manufactured collapse into one another, unsettling any clear boundary between geology and industry.

At what point does a material cease to be “natural” and become “synthetic”? Cement, as a reconstituted form of limestone and clay, embodies this ontological instability, existing simultaneously as a geological residue and an artifact of human engineering. By recontextualizing cement, the exhibition disrupts its conventional anonymity, revealing it not as a passive binder of aggregates but as an active site of material memory, where its transformations can be read, traced, and made tangible.

Through sculptural interventions and material displacements, the works navigate the entanglement of human and geological forces. Some forms appear as if excavated from an unknown past, while others anticipate a fossil record yet to come, a moment in which synthetic and natural sediments become indistinguishable. If the built world functions as an artificial stratigraphy, what does it mean to manufacture stone? And if concrete, once set, is destined to fracture and erode, how does this cycle of making and unmaking define the geologies we now construct?

STUDIO EIDOLA
Studio Eidola, founded in 2020 in Zürich by Denizay Apusoglu and Jonas Kissling, engages in material research and design as a means of interrogating industrial systems and their overlooked residues. Working with mineral waste and by-products, the studio collaborates with local industries to trace material histories and reframe their trajectories. Their practice, spanning objects, spatial interventions, and alternative building materials, resists linear models of extraction and discard. Instead, it proposes a material intelligence that foregrounds transformation and contingency, positioning matter not as static resource or waste but as an active agent within shifting cycles of production and renewal.