POLANSKY GALLERY - Prague

text by Livia Klein (EN) text Livie Klein (CZ) Rule of Thumb by Stanislav Zábrodský (*1996), stages an archaeology of the future. The exhibition 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 can we order and understand processes that exceed our grasp? Measurements based on unspoken rules, by eye, are fragile, prone to error. The belief that geological or technological processes could ever be fully controlled or understood remains a persistent illusion. As Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter, materials have their own vitality. Stanislav Zábrodský’s artistic practice underscores how this energy disrupts narratives centered on the human and instead positions matter as an active force shaping both past and future. He primarily works with composite materials, using them to simulate geological processes unfolding over vast stretches of time. His works do not trace a linear progression from past to future but rather present multiple temporalities at once. The fossil-like imprints that emerge are not remnants left untouched by humans but rather traces of human activity: remnants of the industrial revolution, technological products, and cultural artifacts. Zábrodský’s work resonates with Jussi Parikka’s ‘Geology of Media’ and Ewa Domanska’s call for ‘speculative archaeology’. It presents scenarios in which today’s residues will one day be unearthed from the ground, revealing how geological strata of technological materials come to form part of the future’s stratigraphy. The exhibition is laid out as a suspended system of ‘pseudo’ pulleys and reliefs that record the afterlife of landscapes and machines, which persist as echoes in digital archives and sedimentary matter. A latent interconnectedness emerges: infrastructure of motion suspended between two points. Within this system of pulleys, solidified flows of resin appear frozen in place, materializing forms of continuous memory embedded within the developing material culture of technology. Like the famous ‘Pitch Drop’ experiment at the University of Queensland in Australia, where a single drop of tar takes several years to fall, these traces of resin evoke temporalities that far exceed human perception. They reflect historical technical drawings that preserve the memory of industrial imagination and mechanisms whose functions or purposes remain unknown. The pulleys themselves, shaped like hourglasses, create a double-function mechanism: on one hand, a rotating metal axis bears imprints of sedimentary origin; on the other, its counterweight of pinewood introduces biological temporality into the structure. Together, they form a latent configuration: an open system whose components only become active in relation to each other. Alongside this central installation, the gallery space is framed by a series of concrete and resin cast wall reliefs from the 2025 series ‘Whim Flips Over’. At one end stands a triptych (240x110cm), at the other a quadriptych (160x120cm), with two additional panels (90x60cm) placed along the side walls. In these wall reliefs, Zábrodský turns from systems of motion to surfaces of inscription. Their fractured surfaces accumulate traces of vanished landscapes, industrial imprints, and digital afterimages, materializing the very tension between natural and technological strata that Jussi Parikka reminds us 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, ‘Rule of Thumb’ stages an encounter with matter in transition. Resin, concrete, and tin appear here as provisional fossils, hovering between presence and disappearance. They point towards a time when the remnants 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 artifacts. 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 solely in terms of textual and linguistic structures but also as mediated by artifacts.