Maarten Vanden Eynde: Digging up the Future

Bringing together works from the past 20 years, this book introduces readers to multidisciplinary Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde

Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde (b. 1977) has established a research-based practice, which spans diverse social, economic, environmental, and anthropological perspectives. His work covers some of the most important subjects of our time from extractionism, ecology, and colonialism to the after-effects of colonialism. The book is built up as an alternative encyclopaedia of the history of human kind, investigating our influence on planet Earth. It proposes an industrial and post-industrial archaeology of the future, mapping out a speculative future-fiction of our evolutionary traces, and offers a survey of Vanden Eynde’s work from the past two decades, including Plastic Reef, a massive sculpture made from plastic debris the artist has harvested from all the world’s oceans.