Adrián Villar Rojas: The End of Imagination
Malena Cocca/Noelia Ferretti

208 pp.
numerous b/w illustrations
open thread sewing with loose gatefold cover

Leipzig April, 2024
ISBN: 9783959058315

Width: 17 cm
Length: 24 cm

Language(s): English

Editor
Malena Cocca, Noelia Ferretti

Designer
Malena Cocca

Illustrator
Manuel Depetris

In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and worldwide lockdowns, Adrián Villar Rojas and his collaborators began to record and store open-access webcam videos the world round, then painstakingly recreated every video’s sound landscapes. Briefly lingering above deserted landmarks, The End of Imagination is the film that emerged from this collective effort, focusing almost exclusively on cameras that captured indifferent animals in captivity. Through this mediated perspective on non-human lives in the midst of a very human planetary crisis, the film marks a moment in history which profoundly transformed the present and our relationship to connectivity, community and the planet at large. As the experiential memory faded, perhaps too quickly, from the popular imagination, Villar Rojas decided to name the film, and all his subsequent projects, The End of Imagination. With the same title, The End of Imagination is Villar Rojas’s first-ever comic-book project. It exists in relation to the film The End of Imagination as a sort of sequel while reflecting on the circulation and transmission of art-history books in the artist’s home country of Argentina, and its reliance on Western narratives and pedagogies, at the same time as it celebrates the release of Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse from their copyright duties.

Adrián Villar Rojas conceives long-term projects, collectively and collaboratively produced, that take the shape of large-scale and site-specific environments. Within his research and world-building, which mixes sculpture, drawing, video, literature and performative traces, Villar Rojas brings together the human and more-than-human realms while investigating the fragile and temporary nature of human civilisation.