The Jura Mountains hold traces of worlds long vanished. Amidst the peaks and valleys spanning Switzerland and France, the area that gave the Jurassic period its name, thousands of dinosaur footprints and evidence of prehistoric life have been found. Over millennia the Homo genus emerged too: Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens, among them. In November a new artifact can be encountered, an alien object also abandoned to deep time, it would seem.

Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy) is the latest work by Adrián Villar Rojas, co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary. Premiering this month in Le Brassus, in the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland, the work will become the focus of a solo exhibition by the Argentinian artist at Colorado’s Aspen Art Museum in the US in summer 2026. Cast in bronze – a first for the artist – is the narrow skull of a triceratops, the hollow eye sockets, the jutting lower jaw rendered perfectly. There is an aberration to this form, however: The piercing horns have been replaced with the silhouette of the Venus of Lespugue, a statuette dated to between 26,000 and 24,000 years ago and found in southwest France.

‘This work is, at its core, a speculative fiction that I wanted to materialize, to make it penetrate reality, to exist in the same terms as reality itself,’ Villar Rojas says. ‘A fossil has weight; it’s made of mineral compression, of geological patience. It’s cold, heavy, and durable. If this work was to inhabit the same ontological category as a fossil, it had to speak the same language – the language of rocks.’ The dinosaur and the ancient figure are ‘hyperobjects,’ the artist says. ‘Things we can conceptualize but are not really able to comprehend in their full vastness.’

For two decades Villar Rojas has been associated with sculpture and installations that mine the reconstructed past, the Anthropocene present, and a post-human future. In 2013 at the Serpentine Galleries, London, he presented the seemingly fossilized remains of our world (pop stars, Renaissance statues, and animals in unfired clay intermingled without obvious hierarchy); two years later, for the Istanbul Biennial, he showed a ghostly white fiberglass menagerie floating on the edge of the Marmara Sea – camel and reindeer, among other animals, weighed down with loads of organic matter. Earlier this year he took over all four floors of the Art Sonje Center in Seoul, dismantling the museum’s infrastructure and internal architecture, filling it with earth and apocalyptic debris. The works there were constructed via the artist’s Time Engine, a bespoke digital simulation tool that merges video-game engines, artificial intelligence, and speculative world-building.

With his new project, Audrey Teichmann, curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary, says the artist ‘is pointing towards a deep prehistory of meaning-making. How were the first representations created? Can we call it art? Was it with our ancestor Homo sapiens, or was it inherited from another group, and more specifically here, the Neanderthals?’

Further reflecting on the commission, Teichmann adds: ‘Each commission begins as a dialogue between artist and curator, but also between the artist and the place where the work will live. In Le Brassus, that conversation extends to the landscape itself. Working with the Aspen Art Museum has amplified this sense of exchange, allowing the project to evolve across geographies and ideas.’

The work, created though digital simulation, materializes years of research and an interest in science that rewrites the supremacy of the human species. To offer an accurate dialogue with the project, local paleontologists were consulted, offering more insights about the first location where the work will be presented. Villar Rojas takes up the theme, pointing out that his interest in deep history is inextricably linked to our own fate. ‘I propose a theoretical history that reimagines the origins of symbolic creation – language, art, ritual – not as the triumph of a single species, but as a shared inheritance…a gift from another.’ It is a dilemma the artist suggests Homo sapiens will also face in the future, and must learn from, given the climate emergency and other such existential crises. ‘What would it mean to create the last artwork, the one that closes the history of the species?’

The artist considers the world as a type of readymade that is his to mine, his work becoming part of the landscape and phenomenon it simulates, destined for the same final fate. ‘With this act, we reach the shores of anthropocentric representational systems, the very edges of “art” its ultimate ending. In this context of thinking at and about the limits of art, I have long seen Duchamp as embodying the last frontier – the frontier that removed all frontiers – where “art” and “language” coincide. Duchamp represents, for me, the radical idea of a map on the same scale as the territory itself.’

If the idea of our pending extinction sounds doom-laden, Claude Adjil, curator-at-large for the Aspen Art Museum, who co-curated the presentation in Le Brassus and will curate the show in Aspen, disagrees. ‘I do find the speculative element of his work both frightening and foreboding, but as someone who subscribes to this idea of nonlinear thinking, I find it a useful kind of methodology and a tool to move between things, and to not get trapped in a sense of stasis.’

Villar Rojas notes that should the ‘last’ artwork out-survive Homo sapiens, it has the potential to be regarded as the first artwork of whatever civilization comes next. ‘It’s no longer the last gesture of a species, but the first. What could that first artwork be? And, more deeply and more complicated still: What ignited in us the desire to make symbols, to perform rituals, to create what we now call “art”?’

Teichmann adds, ‘The fact that this could be a collaborative process, a shared past, is very hopeful, because whatever remains of us might likewise be the spark for something else elsewhere. It challenges the vision we have of ourselves.’

When the new commission moves to Aspen next year it will be joined by further works built onsite by Villar Rojas’s studio, a roving team, most of long standing, with whom the artist travels everywhere in ‘parasitic harmony,’ Adjil says, ‘one that lands on the host body of the museum with cells that will aggregate and grow.’ The curator continues that, while the forthcoming exhibition is not about the US, the context of North American mythology and its relationship to ‘the West,’ a land that must be tamed, is unavoidable for a show situated in rural Colorado. ‘The American West has this epic narrative in regard to the land, and Adrián’s use of location is similarly a fictionalized encounter. We have such a fractionalized understanding of time. When we remember something in the long past, we think it’s apolitical, that nature and land are neutral. Adrián is someone who teaches us to be distrustful or at least interrogate that.’

Villar Rojas concurs: ‘Prehistory itself is a very recent concept, barely 250 years old. Not so long ago, from a Western epistemic perspective, all of life on this planet and the planet itself were believed to be around 2,000 years old. Then it became 7,000, then 70,000, then millions, and eventually hundreds of millions. All of this happened within less than two centuries, alongside the rise of modern science in Europe’s dominant economies. It’s worth trying to reconnect with the existential shock this must have caused.’

Villar Rojas says that leaves space for an even more radical understanding of time and how that might provide lessons for our present. ‘It’s a story about how we write our pasts, about who gets to narrate the beginning of meaning, and about how those narratives still shape our hierarchies, our exclusions, our violence.’

Co-commissioned by the Aspen Art Museum and Audemars Piguet Contemporary, Untitled (From the Series The Language of the Enemy) is Adrián Villar Rojas’s first work in bronze. Premiering in Switzerland this month, before traveling to Aspen in 2026, the project explores deep time, evolution, and the origins of symbolic creation. By fusing prehistoric and human forms, Villar Rojas invites us to question where meaning begins and how art might endure beyond our species, transforming today’s creations into the first relics of whatever comes next.

About the curators
Audrey Teichmann is a curator at Audemars Piguet Contemporary, where she commissions and produces ambitious artworks by leading contemporary artists worldwide, supporting the program’s mission to foster creativity and dialogue across disciplines. Her curatorial practice explores the intersections of art, science, and speculative futures, fostering projects that push material and conceptual boundaries.

Claude Adjil is a curator-at-large at the Aspen Art Museum, where she develops exhibitions and research-driven projects that engage with contemporary art’s social, political, and ecological dimensions. Her work often centers on artists who challenge linear histories and reimagine humanity’s relationship with time, technology, and the environment.