In The End of the World (2023-2024), cobalt, rare earths, copper, tin, nickel, lithium, manganese, coltan, germanium and platinum are pressed into a four-centimetre-square cube. These metals are ten of the most critical minerals in the world today, essential for technologies at the centre of both the green transition and war-making. They carry with them their trajectories and origins: the vastness of strip mines cut into the earth; the shadowy ocean depths with their as yet unstudied ecosystems that are plumbed and pillaged for manganese; the rapacious appetite of a society planning to mine the moon, seeing it as another nowhere to conquer and consume. Each layer of the cube is at the centre of raging geopolitical tensions; the physical, environmental and human consequences of acquiring these metals is dizzying.
Placed in the centre of a soaring, cathedral-like space, the small form frames the Arsenale as part of the work. With this precise gesture, Alfredo Jaar condenses the vast tangles of global tragedies into a precise work of pathos and poetry that leaves no space for us to escape.
The cube glistens.
We desire it. We need it. The world ends, again and again.
—Allyn Aglaïa
